Menu for one day: food truck, pop-up and volunteer events

This applies to you

Food truck and food cart. Pop-up restaurant and guest chef for a weekend. The school cafe on OD day. The kiosk for the sports team, the Christmas market, the village days, the food festival, the beach kiosk which is only open in the summer.

Common to all: you cook properly, but don't have a fixed address, a fixed selection or a budget for printed matter. This is exactly where an online menu is most useful - because it costs nothing to change and can be made the night before.

The queue is not standing because of the chef

Most people who run street food believe that the queue is due to preparation time or too few hands. Industry analyzes point to something else: what really slows down the queue is the time guests spend deciding in front of the gate. One indecisive guest is holding everyone back.

And waiting is expensive. When the queue passes eight to ten minutes, a significant proportion give up and move on without ordering. Guests also overestimate the waiting time by 20-40 percent when they have nothing to do in the meantime.

A QR code on the side of the trolley - and preferably on a poster ten meters behind the queue - allows people to read the menu while they are waiting. They arrive at the hatch with their order ready, the queue moves faster, and those waiting have something to look at. Share the link in your Instagram story when you open, and half the queue will have made up their minds before they arrive.

"Sold out" with one click

Nothing annoys a hungry guest more than standing in line for ten minutes for something that ran out an hour ago. On a blackboard, you must trace over with chalk; on a printed menu you cannot do anything.

In MyMenu, you mark the dish as sold out with one tap on your mobile, and anyone who scans the code from then on sees it immediately. For a place that makes fifty servings and is done, this is probably the single function you will use the most.

Prices and selection can be changed in the middle of the day

Half price in the last hour to get rid of leftovers. An extra right when the delivery came anyway. Today's soup that is changed for tomorrow. Everything changes in seconds from the mobile phone, and is live immediately - without anyone having to drive to the print shop.

If you are moving, or you are finished for the season, you can turn on the closed banner. Then the guests will see the message immediately instead of searching for you in vain.

Allergens also apply when the place is temporary

The duty to inform about the 14 allergens follows the food, not the premises. If you serve food to the public, the guests should be able to find out what is in the dishes - whether it is from a food truck, a pop-up or a school cafe.

This is exactly where temporary places struggle the most: the information is in the head of the person who prepared the food, and that person is not always standing in the hatch. With the allergens marked on each dish in the menu, the guest can check for himself, and those standing in the stall do not have to guess.

Also remember the formalities: food trucks and food carts must be registered with the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, and serving usually requires permission from the municipality where you are standing. If you run a volunteer service or a school cafe, do a quick check with the Norwegian Food Safety Authority and the municipality in advance - the rules vary depending on how often and how professionally you serve.

A QR code does not blow away

Laminated menus fly off the table in the wind, get wet in the rain and disappear during a festival weekend. A QR code can be printed in ten copies for a few kroner, taped to the trolley, on the poster, on the tables in the gymnasium and on the takeaway bag.

Write a short sentence next to the code - for example "Scan for menu and allergens" - and far more people will scan. If one breaks, you just print a new one.

The menu moves with you

The address of the menu is the same regardless of where you are today. This means that one link can be repeated everywhere: in the Instagram profile, in the Facebook event, in the festival program and on the poster.

On the about page, you can enter where you are right now, the opening hours for the weekend and a telephone number for advance booking - and the guest can start the directions in their own map.

Festival guests read in their own language

At food festivals, Christmas markets and tourist spots, a large proportion of the guests do not speak Norwegian. The menu is automatically displayed in the guest's own language – 23 in total – without you having to do anything.

For a guest who doesn't know what "raspeballer" or "lompe" are, it's the difference between trying something new and moving on to the neighboring stall.

For one day, it usually costs nothing

The monthly plan has the first month free, and can be terminated at any time. Should you have a café on OD day, stand at the Christmas market for a weekend or test a pop-up for one month, this means in practice that the menu is free for you.

The card must be registered when you create the subscription, but the first withdrawal will only come after 30 days - if you cancel before then, you will never be charged. On the other hand, if you are going to run a food truck throughout the season, the annual plan is cheaper than printing menus once.

The checklist the night before

Take a picture of your handwritten menu, and MyMenu will read in the dishes automatically. Go over the prices, tick off the allergens, and post a picture of the three dishes you would most like to sell. Print the QR code in a few copies and tape them up where the queue is.

Finally: scan the code with your own mobile and read through the menu as a guest. It takes two minutes, and that's when you spot the last typo before someone else does.