Food Menu System

[TechMonkey]

Very random request. We have a three weekly menu that we display on our digital signage system and on the website.  Currently the kitchen manager types up the menu, it goes to the marketing person to put in a template, then comes to us to convert into PDFs to upload to various places.  Then of course something changes and we have to go through the whole thing again.

 

What I would like is a web-based system that the kitchen manager can enter the weeks menu and then a UI that will pull out todays (or tomorrows, or a specific date) menu and display it in a pre-formatted method.  This would allow any changes to be added by the kitchen manager and be live instantly, means the marketing person just has to design the template and the info will be slotted in, and we don't have to do anything at all! It would also mean other systems could reference it without any major faff.

 

Before I try and cobble something together and reinvent the wheel, does anyone know of a system that does anything like this?

 

TIA

Edited April 15 by TechMonkey

[dhicks]

22 hours ago, TechMonkey said:

What I would like is a web-based system that the kitchen manager can enter the weeks menu and then a UI that will pull out todays (or tomorrows, or a specific date) menu and display it in a pre-formatted method.

 

We have the exact same menu schedual as you - 3 weeks of a rotating menu, mostly the same with a few tweaks here and there. I've created a system where the kitchen team can input items into a spreadsheet (Google Sheets in our case, with appropriate access handled by Google Drive, although on the backend it's handled as an Excel / CSV file) and that gets converted into a self-contained web page (also a PowerPoint file, and PDF output should also be possible). A bit of tweaking would probably be needed to fit it to your exact situation, but should be do-able.

[TechMonkey]

That would be cool. I've start fleshing out a database and now dreading the creation of an interface, then realised I would have to secure it and have users and then I scared myself away from it all!!

[dhicks]

46 minutes ago, TechMonkey said:

That would be cool. I've start fleshing out a database and now dreading the creation of an interface, then realised I would have to secure it and have users and then I scared myself away from it all!!

 

Okay: so my system is a Python script, running on a Windows server. I sync files from a folder on Google Drive using rclone, my script goes through the files (Excel / CSV files for data, HTML files for templates) and puts the data into the appropriate template file, then copies the result to a small, local web server where it is picked up by the display screens. Our display screens are managed ChromeOS devices, so my script finishes with a reboot of those devices to get them to update.

 

Does that sound like something you will be able to host yourself? A local server in your school building, or a remote server would work. Do you use Google Drive or Microsoft 365 for shared file storage, or something else?

 

How do you want to go about triggering the script? It's a shell script, it runs from the command line, I have it sat on my own web server that handles running this sort of thing, with appropriate access control, so the kitchen staff can log in and hit "run" if they make a change to the menu, otherwise it updates overnight.

 

Our setup in the kitchen is two 65" portrait-mode 4K TVs, each driven by a managed ChromeOS device, with a separate menu on each (one for mains, one for everything else). You might have a different setup, so we'll need to change the templates a bit - just basic HTML files, the sort of thing you can get AI to produce quite easily.

[dhicks]

On 16/04/2026 at 14:23, dhicks said:

Our setup in the kitchen is two 65" portrait-mode 4K TVs, each driven by a managed ChromeOS device, with a separate menu on each (one for mains, one for everything else).

 

Took a quick picture this morning:

 

[TechMonkey]

Huh, that looks pretty sweet.  I'm going to have a stab at mocking something up, as I have missed doing some coding in slack times, but if it is OK to come back to you once I have got frustrated and realised this is a much bigger project than I have time for

[flipthebit]

AI can get you some of the way if you're coding things like this.

[dhicks]

7 minutes ago, flipthebit said:

AI can get you some of the way if you're coding things like this.

 

I found Gemini very helpful for the display template HTML/CSS page itself, and for generating the border image around the sides. The fiddly bit is finding somewhere to host the data file, script abd output files.

[flipthebit]

Can your intranet be configured to play that role (if you have one)?

[STK91]

On 16/04/2026 at 13:26, TechMonkey said:

That would be cool. I've start fleshing out a database and now dreading the creation of an interface, then realised I would have to secure it and have users and then I scared myself away from it all!!

You should try using https://claude.ai/login for this. Could easily knock something together.

[Danp]

I bet you could get Canva AI to make up a template website that would do this. Then you only have to load a webpage on the DS