Menu import from a photo or PDF, the Zayos walkthrough
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
Menu import turns a photo or PDF of your existing menu into a live ordering menu. An AI pass reads items, prices and sections, lands around 80% accurate, and a human tidies the rest before you turn ordering on. The last 20% is nearly always modifier logic.
Why does typing the menu stall so many launches?
Ask an operator why their online ordering never went live and the answer is almost never the software. It is that somebody had to type ninety two items, each with a description, a price, a photo and three modifier groups, and that somebody was the owner, at eleven at night, after a double. It gets to item forty and stops.
Menu entry is the most common reason a restaurant technology project dies before it launches, and it is pure data entry, which is exactly the kind of work a machine should be doing.
A menu import reads what you already have. You point a camera at the menu on your counter, or upload the PDF your designer sent you in 2023, and the items, sections, descriptions and prices come back as real records you can edit. The work that remains is judgment work, and it is much smaller than the typing was.
What does the import always get wrong?
Nine of them, and they are the same nine on almost every menu. Knowing them in advance turns a vague proofreading job into a checklist you can hand to a manager.
Half and full portions on one line
What happens A line printed "Hummus S 6 / L 10" becomes one item at one price, usually the first number it finds.
Fix Make it one item with a size modifier group, required, minimum one, maximum one, small at $0 and large at $4. One item, two prices, one place to edit.
Footnote modifiers
What happens The line at the bottom of the section that reads "add chicken +3, add falafel +2" applies to six dishes. The import attaches it to none of them, or to every item on the page.
Fix Write your add-on groups on a separate sheet before you upload, then attach each group to the items it belongs to. This is the single biggest chunk of the missing 20%.
Market price
What happens MP, market price and "ask your server" are not numbers. Some importers drop the item, some price it at zero, which is worse.
Fix Decide before you upload whether that item is orderable online at all. If it is, set a real price with a note. If it is not, leave it off and mention it in the section description.
Choice of two sides
What happens That phrase is logic wearing the clothes of a description. It comes through as text inside the item description, so the diner picks nothing and the kitchen guesses.
Fix Convert every "choice of" into a modifier group with a minimum and a maximum. Choice of two sides is min 2, max 2, all options free.
Two column layouts
What happens Prices from the right hand column land on the left hand items. The menu looks plausible and is wrong on roughly half its lines, which is the worst failure mode because it does not look broken.
Fix Shoot or export one column at a time if the layout is tight, and always proof price by price against the printed menu rather than skimming.
Names that are not English
What happens Shawarma spelled three ways across one menu, Arabic or Spanish script alongside the English, accents dropped. The import is faithful to the inconsistency it was given.
Fix Pick one spelling per dish and fix it once in the master record. Your search results, your kitchen tickets and your regulars all benefit.
Glare, curl and angle
What happens A laminated menu under a ceiling light, photographed at an angle, loses whole lines. Missing items are quieter than wrong items and get caught much later.
Fix Flat surface, daylight, straight down, no flash, one page per photo, all four corners in the frame. Two minutes of care beats an hour of correction.
The menu you no longer cook
What happens The PDF on your desktop is eighteen months old. The import is perfectly faithful to a menu with four dishes you stopped making and two prices you raised in the spring.
Fix Delete and correct before you upload, not after. Editing a printed page with a pen is faster than editing thirty records in a browser.
Tax class
What happens It was never on the printed menu, so it cannot be in the import. Hot food, cold grocery, bottled drinks and alcohol are not always taxed the same.
Fix Set it per item during review. It takes ten minutes once and it is the field that makes a filing wrong for a year if you skip it.
How do you prep a menu file so the import lands clean?
Twenty minutes of preparation removes most of an afternoon of correction. Do these in order.
- 01
Start from the file, not a photo of the file
A menu exported as a native PDF from a design tool carries real text, which reads almost perfectly. A scan or a phone photo is an image, and every character has to be recognised. If the designer who made your menu still has the file, that email is worth more than any prep tip on this page.
- 02
If it has to be a photo, shoot it properly
Flat on a table, straight down, daylight or an even indoor light, no flash on a laminated card, one page per photo, all four corners inside the frame. Do not fold the menu to fit it in shot.
- 03
Mark up the printed menu first
With a pen, on paper. Cross out what you no longer sell, correct prices you have raised, and circle anything with a portion size or a market price. Five minutes here removes most of the cleanup later.
- 04
Decide the online price now
The number you upload should be the price you want on your own site. Marketplace markup to cover 15% to 30% commission is a separate rule you set afterwards, not something to bake into the master menu.
- 05
Write your modifier groups on one sheet
For each group: the name, its options, whether it is required, the minimum and maximum selections, and which options are free. Choose your protein, required, min 1, max 1. Add sauces, optional, max 3, first free. This sheet is what turns an 80% import into a working menu.
- 06
Flag daypart items and prep times
Note which items are breakfast only or weekend only, and roughly how long each one takes to make. Prep time per item is what drives an honest quoted time and, if you take future orders, the fire time on a scheduled ticket.
- 07
Upload, then review section by section
Do not proof the whole menu at once. Take one section, check every line against the paper, fix it, move on. Section by section is how you catch a zippered two column layout; skimming is how you miss it.
What should you check before you take a real order?
Six checks. The first one catches the error that costs the most, because an item nobody can add to a cart looks exactly like an item nobody wanted.
- Add every single item to a cart. An item that cannot be added is almost always a required modifier group with no options left in it, and nothing on a dashboard will tell you.
- Proof your ten highest priced items first. A decimal slip on a $4 side costs less than one on a $46 party tray, and the tray is the one that will sell today.
- Place a real order for your three best sellers, pay for it, then refund it. Preview mode does not test checkout, tax or the kitchen ticket.
- Read the whole menu on the smallest phone in the building. Most of your traffic is a 360 pixel wide screen and long item names wrap badly there.
- Count your items against the printed menu. A number that is short by four means four lines were lost to glare or a fold.
- Check tax class on every item, especially drinks, packaged goods and anything age restricted.
A menu is not live because it is uploaded. It is live when you have bought your three best sellers from it with your own card and the ticket printed correctly in the kitchen.
How does Zayos import your menu?
Three routes, and you can mix them. An AI import from a photo or PDF of your current menu, which lands around 80% accurate and leaves you tidying modifiers and portions. A pull from your register through Otter, which suits operators whose POS is already clean. Or a CSV template if you keep your menu in a spreadsheet. Most restaurants use two of the three: the POS pull for the core menu, the photo import for catering and seasonal items that never made it into the register.
On the Concierge plan at $699 per location per month, we load the menu for you and send screenshots to confirm before anything is orderable. On Operator at $499 and Operator plus Marketplace at $599, the import runs and you review. All three are month to month with no setup fee.
Once the menu is in, it is one record per item feeding everything: your branded ordering site on your own domain, the kitchen tablet, and, on Operator plus Marketplace, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub through Otter. That is the point of doing the import properly once. See the full ordering system it feeds, or the week by week onboarding.
Zayos takes no commission. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and tips, and the diner pays a small service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in, 10% on catering. Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach is live and taking orders today. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke and Yalla Market.
Menu import, answered
Can you really build an ordering menu from a photo of a paper menu?
What does 80% accurate actually mean in practice?
Photo or PDF, which imports better?
What if my menu is in Arabic, Spanish or transliterated English?
Do I have to import at all, or can you pull my menu from my POS?
Who does the work, me or you?
Send us the photo. We do the rest.
Start with the free AI report on your current setup. 60 seconds, no card, no call.