Paper Menus & You
No matter how pretty or bright your digital displays are, paper menus still have a place on the sales floor. They give budtenders a simple tool to guide conversations and help customers compare products at a glance. The problem isn't the menu itself—it's keeping it current.
When products move quickly across multiple registers, sold-out items get crossed off throughout the day until the menu starts looking less like a menu and more like a crossword puzzle.
So, how do you automate it?
Paper Trail
It turns out there are multiple ways to accomplish the same goal.
If you use Dutchie and Google, you can set up Dutchie to automatically email a current inventory report, from their you can (or me) set up some bots to move it from into Google Sheets, a few Apps Script automations process the data, AppSheet handles the final updates, and the result is a fully customizable menu that refreshes automatically.
Sound Complicated, no worries. Dopecast offers integrations with Dutchie, Flowhub, and Treez, allowing operators to connect their APIs and generate menus at no cost. If you're already using Dutchie Ecommerce, there's also a built-in option to generate printable menus directly from the platform.
Chinese Resturant Style Menu
Creating a menu isnt hard, most people use services like Canva. While updating and decorating menus can be time sucks, they also add up.
If a budtender spends four (4) hours every week updating menus…
Labor: approximately $303 per month
Canva Pro: approximately $15 per month
Total monthly cost: about $318
Nearly 95% of that expense is labor, not software.
Reducing menu maintenance from four hours to one hour each week saves roughly three labor hours per week, about $227 per month, or more than $2,700 per year.
Scale that across five locations, and you're looking at more than $18,000 annually spent maintaining paper menus before factoring in management time or design revisions.
The takeaway is simple: menu automation doesn't have to be expensive. Whether you build your own workflow, use Dopecast, or take advantage of Dutchie's built-in menu tools, there are free options that can eliminate hours of repetitive work every month.
I just gave you three ways to save money for free. Become an Industry Plant today for the good stuff….
