A menu company that is really a print-engineering company.

Most software companies that touch restaurants are chasing the transaction — the order, the payment, the delivery. Menus get treated as content management, and content management treats a menu as a list of things with prices.

A printed menu isn’t a list. It is a typeset object where the leading, the rules, the ragging, and the way a price sits against a dot leader are all decisions somebody made on purpose. Reproduce it approximately and a designer will notice immediately, a guest will notice unconsciously, and the brand pays for it either way.

So the hard part of this business turns out not to be storing menu items. It is producing, reliably and at volume, a file that a professional printer accepts and a designer signs off — from information that changes constantly, across hundreds of locations, every one of them slightly different. That turns out to be a much harder problem than it looks, and it is the one we have spent nearly two decades getting right.

Why we still care about print

Every few years someone announces that printed menus are finished. Meanwhile our clients print more menus than they did the year before, because a dining room is not a website and a menu you hand someone is part of the meal.

We build for digital too — your website can already take its menus straight from us, and menus for the table and for the phone are coming. But we start from print, because software built for screens and then stretched to fit print is always worse than the other way round. Only one of those directions loses something on the way.

You will not get stranded

Ask most vendors for something specific to how you operate and you get one of two answers. Either no, or yes, a special version just for you. The second sounds like the better answer. It usually isn’t, because a version built and then left alone works beautifully for about a year, then slowly falls behind while the product moves on, until one day you are the client nobody wants to touch.

That doesn’t happen here. What we build for you is built to stay current: five years on you are running current software, not a museum piece. Clients who came to us years ago are running something considerably better today than the thing they originally bought.

The same goes for what we promise. We will tell you plainly what exists today and what doesn’t — on this site, and in the room. Nobody should discover after signing that the capability they were counting on was a plan.

Where we are

We are based in Tempe, Arizona, and small by design — the people who build the software are the people you talk to about it.