Locu – Digital Menu Management

Diners these days expect to find comprehensive menus when they check the websites for their favorite restaurants, cafes, and bars. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for the owners of these establishments to update their menus once they’ve been posted online, leading to outdated information and outright errors when it comes to the menu items and prices for a given night.

Locu is a tool that restaurant owners can use to quickly post, edit, and change the menus they publish online. When you use Locu, you can design you menu from scratch or edit the menu you already have. Add entire sections, change the pricing for specific dishes, or update your menu daily with specials that change based on what’s in season. Locu also offers a design tool, which you can use to give your menu a more professional look. Choose from one of Locu’s handful of menu templates, or upload your own assets and create a custom design that fits in nicely with the business branding you’ve already established.

In addition to publishing your menu on your own business website, you can also share your menu across the web. Connect Locu to any social media accounts your business uses, and you can seamlessly update your menu on all those sites (including Facebook and Twitter) each time you click “publish.”

Practical Uses:

• Post a menu on your restaurant website
• Make sure your Facebook fans can see what you’re serving on a given night
• Keep the pricing on your website up to date
• Design a digital menu that compliments your restaurant’s existing branding campaign

Insider Tips:

• Locu already has the current online menus for many restaurants saved on its site
• Users can upload their existing menus in .doc, .pdf, .jpeg, and other formats
• Locu offers menu templates that people can use to design their menus from scratch

What we liked:

• Restaurant owners don’t have to call their webmasters each time they want to update their sites
• Chefs can post daily specials on their restaurant’s websites
• Locu updates menus on social media sites each time a user clicks “publish”
• Customers can feel confident that the pricing on a restaurant’s website is accurate

What we didn’t like:

• Users must sign up for a premium account to get access to Locu’s menu templates

Alternatives:

• CleverMenu – http://www.clevermenu.com
• OpenMenu – http://openmenu.com

Company Info:

• Launched: 2012
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Rene Reinsberg, Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos, Marc Piette, and Marek Olszewski
• Web site: https://locu.com

Costs:

• Basic plan is free
• Premium plan is $25 per venue, per month