This is an illustrative example, not a real customer — Octopus Menu is pre-launch. Picture a café a five-minute walk from Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, serving around 80 covers a day — roughly a third of them tourists in the summer months, from France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy, and beyond.
The problem
The owner is French and the team speak English and French fluently. But in peak tourist season, guests regularly scan the printed English menu, hesitate, and order the one thing they recognise — or quietly leave. Every uncertain guest is a smaller order, or a sale walking out the door.
You can see they aren’t comfortable. A table of tourists comes in, looks at the menu for a minute, and one of them orders a coffee for the whole table. They want more, but they don’t know what they are looking at.
A digital menu meets every guest in their own language the moment they scan — no extra printing, nothing to go stale, and no team stretched across six languages at once. That’s the gap it closes.
The switch
The owner signs up for Octopus Menu’s Growth plan, builds the menu in an evening, and is live the next morning. The translation feature — automatic and available in up to 24 languages — lets guests tap a flag or language name at the top of the menu and the entire menu switches.
There is nothing to do for the translation itself: descriptions are written once in English, and the platform handles the rest. It isn’t a substitute for a professional human translation, but it gives every guest a menu they can actually read in their own language — instantly. (Translations are written for you on Essential and Growth; on Free you type them yourself.)
What this looks like over 3 months
Illustrative figures, not measured results- Languages actively used by guests in the first month
- 12
- Illustrative average order-value uplift vs prior year
- +18%
- Of summer scans in a non-English language
- 40%
What changes
The analytics are the surprise. Seeing 40% of scans in non-English languages is striking — almost half the customers were not comfortable ordering in English. The most used non-English languages mirror Edinburgh’s tourist mix: French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.
The order-value uplift comes primarily from the food side. Before, international guests who couldn’t read the descriptions tended to stick to drinks. Once they can read what each dish actually is, they order food more confidently — and often add sides and desserts they hadn’t noticed before.
“A table of four guests who couldn’t read English spend three minutes with the menu, order individually — different dishes each — and leave happy. Without a menu they could read, they’d have shared one item or left. That’s the difference.”
The operational side
Because translation is automatic, the owner’s only job is to write good English descriptions. A new dish is described once, saved, and guests see it in their chosen language immediately. There is no extra work for translated menus.
