How to import your restaurant menu from a PDF or Excel file

The problem with starting from scratch

When a restaurant owner signs up for a digital menu platform, the first thing they face is a blank screen and a form asking for dish name, description, price — one by one.

For a restaurant with 30 dishes, that's 30 rounds of copy-pasting from a PDF, reformatting prices, and hoping nothing gets missed. Most owners give up somewhere around dish 12.

The irony is that the menu already exists. It's on a PDF they send to guests. It's in a Word document their designer made three years ago. It's on a spreadsheet their manager keeps updating. The information is there — it just needs to move.

Upload your existing menu file

ArriveMenu accepts the formats your menu is most likely already in:

• PDF — the most common format for print menus
• Excel (.xlsx) — common for menus maintained by managers or accountants
• CSV — if you're exporting from another system
• Photo (JPG, PNG, WebP) — including photos of physical printed menus

You don't need to clean the file up first. Upload it as it is.

What happens when you upload

When you upload your menu file, ArriveMenu reads the content and sends it to an AI that has been trained to recognise menu structure — categories, dish names, descriptions, and prices — regardless of how the original file was formatted.

A PDF with a two-column layout? It handles it. An Excel spreadsheet where prices are in one column and dish names in another? It handles that too. A photo of a handwritten menu on a chalkboard? Surprisingly, it handles that as well.

The AI returns a structured preview: categories with their dishes grouped under them, names, descriptions, and prices extracted from the original. The whole process takes a few seconds.

Review before you import

The preview step matters. AI is accurate but not perfect — it might misread a price, merge two categories that should be separate, or miss a dish that was formatted unusually in the original file.

Before anything is imported, you see everything the AI found. You can:

• Edit any dish name, description, or price inline
• Remove dishes you don't want to carry over
• Delete entire categories
• Edit category names and emoji

Only after you confirm does anything get added to your menu. Nothing is imported automatically without your review.

After import

Once you confirm, your categories and dishes are created instantly. From that point, the menu works exactly like a menu you'd built from scratch — you can add photos, update prices, mark dishes as out of stock, and make any other changes from the dashboard.

The QR code points to the same menu. Any changes you make are live immediately.

The case for AI autofill on individual dishes

Import handles the bulk migration. For individual dishes added later — new seasonal items, specials, additions to the menu — there's a faster way than writing descriptions yourself.

When you add a new dish, type the name and click ✨ Fill with AI. Based on the dish name, the AI generates:

• A description (typically 1–2 sentences, appetite-forward)
• An ingredients list
• Common allergens
• An estimated calorie count

You edit what needs editing and save. For a common dish like "Shakshuka" or "Margherita Pizza", the generated content is usually close enough to use with minor adjustments. For a house speciality with a distinctive preparation, it gives you a starting point to work from.

The cost per dish is fractions of a cent. For a full menu of 40 dishes, AI autofill costs less than a dollar in API usage — and saves an hour of writing.

Why this matters for getting started

The hardest part of switching to a digital menu is the setup. If setup means retyping your entire menu from scratch, most restaurants delay it indefinitely or abandon it partway through.

Upload-and-import removes that barrier. The menu is already written — you just need it in the right place. Upload the file, review the result, confirm. Your digital menu is live before you've finished your coffee.

Try it without creating an account

You can try the import on ArriveMenu before signing up. Drop your menu file on the homepage, and you'll see the AI parse it in real time — categories, dishes, and prices extracted and displayed as a preview.

If you like what you see, create a free account and your imported menu carries over automatically. Nothing to redo.