Digital Menu for Restaurants in Saudi Arabia
A Saudi menu has to say more than a menu almost anywhere else in the Gulf.
Calories beside every item. Fourteen allergens declared. A salt icon on the heavy dishes, a caffeine figure on the coffee, and the minutes it would take to walk the thing off. All of it in Arabic, and inside the menu rather than on a card by the till.
Each of those, on paper, is a print run. Stack them and you get what plenty of operators in Riyadh and Jeddah live with: a menu slightly out of date, and a plan to fix it later.
A digital menu for restaurants in Saudi Arabia solves the reprint problem first and the ordering problem second. The second one is where the money is.
What Does a Saudi Menu Have to Show?
More than most owners realise. The Saudi Food and Drug Authority has been adding requirements for years, and they stack rather than replace each other.
Calories, on every item, since January 2019
There is no chain-size threshold here, which surprises people used to markets where calorie rules only bite above twenty branches. A single coffee shop on Tahlia Street counts exactly as a national chain does.
- The figure in kcal, on the face of the menu next to the item
- Separate figures for portions, sides, drinks and sauces, and for the same dish cooked a different way
- A reference statement: 2,000 kcal a day for adults, 1,200 to 1,500 for children aged four to thirteen
Two details catch people out. The figure must be accurate to within twenty per cent, and it must appear in the same font size, type and colour as the item name or price. Small grey text under the description will not do.
What Changed in July 2025?
Three further declarations took effect, and they are the ones still missing from most menus:
- A salt shaker icon on any item over 5 g of salt, or 2,000 mg of sodium, per serving
- Caffeine in mg per 100 ml or per cup, with a note that adults should stay under 400 mg a day
- A walking icon and the minutes of activity needed to burn the item off, shown with the calories
If you run a coffee shop, read that middle one twice. Every drink on the board needs a figure.
Fourteen allergens, inside the menu
Mandatory since October 2019, and the wording matters: the declaration sits in the menu, permanently, somewhere clear and legible — not in a folder the host fetches on request. Food trucks and catering contracts are included.
Arabic, with your other languages beside it
This is where Saudi Arabia parts company with its neighbours. There is no verified rule that your whole menu must be Arabic, but the regulated data — calories and allergens — must be in Arabic, with a translation permitted alongside. A menu carrying all that in English only is not compliant, however international the dining room.
An English menu with an Arabic version as a separate file now costs more than it saves.
Read the requirements yourself before acting on any of this. Scope and exemptions are where operators get caught, and a summary written by a software company is not what an inspector works from. The SFDA guide for food establishments is the source. MENO is a menu platform, not a compliance service.
Why Does This Break a Printed Menu?
Because none of it arrived at once, and none of it will stop arriving. Each requirement landed on its own date, and each means a design job, a proof and a print run.
Then there is the part that genuinely catches people out. The requirement does not stop at the menu on your table. It reaches the establishment’s electronic menus, its own web pages, and the ordering platforms the restaurant has contracted with. Your listing on a delivery app is your responsibility, not the app’s.
So the same calorie figure, allergen line and Arabic wording have to be right in three places at once: the table, your own ordering link, and every aggregator you sell through. Keeping three copies in sync by hand is not a discipline problem. It is an arithmetic problem, and it compounds with every branch.
A PDF behind a QR code does not fix that. If changing a calorie figure means opening design software and exporting a file, you have not moved the menu online. You have moved the printer online.
What Does a Digital Menu for Saudi Restaurants Actually Do?
The regulated data lives on the dish
Calories, allergens and nutrition sit in fields attached to the item, not in small type at the bottom of page four. Change a recipe, change the figure. The guest reads it where the decision is actually being made.
Arabic and English behind one QR code
A MENO menu runs in English plus fourteen other languages and the guest switches on the page itself. Same QR code, same table, different reader.
With Vision 2030 targeting 150 million visitors, the multilingual side of a QR menu stops being a nice touch. A guest who cannot read the menu orders the one dish they recognise, and you sold the safe thing instead of the profitable one.
Photos, options and offers
Every item gets a page with photos, because guests order more when they can see the dish. Sizes and required choices are priced individually — “choose your bread”, “add extra cheese, $2” — so staff are not carrying options out loud during a rush.
Orders Go Straight to Your WhatsApp
The menu takes the order. That is the part most menu tools skip.
The Communications, Space and Technology Commission puts WhatsApp at the top of the Kingdom’s communication apps, reaching 94.4 per cent of men and 90.4 per cent of women online, with 99.6 per cent of device usage on a mobile phone. Nobody has to be persuaded to install anything.
Your guest browses, builds a cart, picks how they want to pay and sends. The order lands in your WhatsApp as one structured message, every item and option written out. No POS integration, no merchant account, no gateway application. You settle the money as you already do:
- Cash on delivery
- Card at the door, on the machine you already own
- A payment link you send after confirming
- Bank transfer
Because the payment never runs through the menu, there is nothing to take a percentage of. Zero commission is a consequence of the design, not a rate that expires. And a WhatsApp ordering system is not an invoicing system: your ZATCA obligations do not move.
What Are You Actually Paying the Apps?
Nobody publishes a rate card, so an honest answer has to be assembled from the few places real numbers surface. Three platforms now hold more than ninety per cent of Saudi delivery between them. Jahez, the one listed on Tadawul and therefore obliged to tell you things, reported a 16.5 per cent take rate on its Saudi business last quarter. Read that as a floor, not a headline — it is blended across food, grocery and retail.
The more useful number is what your customer pays. Argaam compared prices across the major platforms and found menu prices running from roughly twenty per cent above the restaurant’s own price to more than eighty per cent above it.
That gap is you, pricing the commission back in. Which means your app customers already pay more for your food than your direct customers do. They just do not know which side of the gap they are standing on.
Nor is the relationship yours. HungerStation draws 61 per cent of its order value from subscribers, the highest rate in any Delivery Hero market — diners loyal to a subscription rather than to your kitchen. We went through what delivery apps actually charge in more detail for the UAE.
One Dashboard for Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam
Saudi groups spread out early. A brand that works in Riyadh is in Jeddah within the year and Al Khobar the year after.
You build each item once into a master catalogue, then assign it to whichever outlets carry it. Update a photo, a description or a calorie figure once and every outlet updates together — which matters more here than elsewhere, for reasons this page has already covered.
Prices work the other way, deliberately. You set a different price for the same item at each outlet without duplicating anything. A mall unit in Riyadh and a roadside branch in Dammam are not the same business.
Each outlet keeps its own QR code, opening hours, delivery zones, tax setup and analytics, and staff see only their own. The QR side runs on QRHUB, which builds QR solutions for hospitality across the region.
You Can See What Guests Actually Order
A printed menu tells you nothing. A digital one reports while service is still running: scans, menu visits, which items were opened, which were ordered, which link brought the guest in. If a dish is opened forty times and ordered twice, the problem is the photograph.
Saudi Arabia now has more than 5,000 branded coffee outlets, close to half the Middle East total, and that is where this bites hardest. A digital menu for a café turns a drinks board into something you can measure.
Does This Replace Your Delivery Apps?
Not unless you decide it should, and most operators should not. The Transport General Authority counted more than 132 million delivery orders in the Kingdom in a single quarter, with Riyadh alone accounting for 44 per cent of them.
The split is what holds up. An aggregator introduces you to people who have never eaten your food, and charges for the introduction. Your own link serves the ones who already know where you are. A guest who found you on an app last month does not need introducing twice: put a QR code on the bag and the second order carries no commission.
The regulator appears to lean the same way. The General Authority for Competition has consulted on draft rules that would stop dominant platforms imposing exclusivity and price-parity terms, and the draft places restaurants’ own direct ordering channels outside its scope.
What Does a Digital Menu Cost in Saudi Arabia?
Most vendors in this market will not tell you without a phone call. Here is the number.
- $29 per month, or $290 for the year
- One outlet included, more added at a fixed monthly rate each
- 0% commission on every order, permanently
- Every feature on every plan. No premium tier.
- 30 days free, no credit card
You can check the current plan and everything included in it before committing to anything.
Prices are current at the time of writing and are billed in USD.
How Do You Get Started?
If your dishes already sit in a spreadsheet, this is an afternoon’s work.
- Upload the Excel file, or add items by hand
- Add sizes, required choices and paid extras
- Fill in calories, allergens and nutrition on each item
- Set your logo, brand colour and cover image
- Choose the outlet’s languages, with Arabic on
- Generate your branded QR code and put it on the table
Step three is the one people postpone and the one the regulator cares about. Do it while you are moving items across, not after.
The Menu Should Be the Fast Part
Everything else in a restaurant is expensive to change: the room, the kitchen, the team, the supplier list. The menu ought to be the one thing you can change before lunch. On paper it is a lead time and an invoice, which is why so many menus in the Kingdom run a requirement or two behind. The rules will keep arriving. The question is whether the next one costs you an afternoon or a print run.
Make the menu the fast part.