Restaurant menus have become a hot topic in the online marketing world, with players like SinglePlatform, Locu and now MustHaveMenus vying for the top position in online menu management.
MustHaveMenus is not really a recent entrant to the market, having been spawned in 2011 from the Letters & Arts incubator. MustHaveMenus allows restaurant owners to design high quality menus online, using thousands of templates. These menus can then be published on the restaurant’s website and Facebook page, as well as exported as a PDF and then printed. MustHaveMenus now also offers printing services, further adding to its capabilities.
MustHaveMenus distinguishes itself from SinglePlatform and Locu by providing a high level of design capability and customization. Restaurants can choose a template that matches not just the identity of their restaurant, but also the theme of the menu. This is great for daily specials, seasonal menus, even special event menus. MustHaveMenus also allows the restaurant to have updated menus both on the website AND in the restaurant. If there are any last minute changes, these can be reflected in both physical and digital menus, all for $15/month.
One of the drawbacks to MustHaveMenus is that, due to the high level of design involved in the menus, restaurants cannot embed HTML menus into their website. The embedded menus that MustHaveMenus offers are JPG or PDF, which are all but invisible to search engines. For restaurants looking to include as much crawlable data on their websites, this is a disadvantage when compared to coding the menus directly into HTML.
As a menu management system, MustHaveMenus offers an affordable and easy to use platform that allows restaurants to rapidly generate great looking menus for their website and restaurant. The lack of SEO capability is a drawback, one that MustHaveMenus may address in the future. MustHaveMenus should appeal to the restaurant owner who wants an easy solution and isn’t concerned with their menu contributing to the strength of their online marketing.