A table QR stand for a restaurant menu

By Tiehl Roberto Matías · 7 min read · Updated 27 October 2026

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A menu stand gets cleaned several times a day, hits the floor every week and has to be readable from a chair. Those three demands rule out half the designs going around. Here are the decisions that matter.

The most important decision is not the piece: it is the link

Before printing anything, stop and think about where the code points. This is the mistake that costs money, because you find it out when you already have forty stands on the tables.

Do not put the long address of whichever menu platform you use today. If tomorrow you change provider, or they put the price up, or they close, you have to reprint the whole set.

Put a short address on your own domain that redirects wherever it needs to:

• myrestaurant.com/menu is short, it makes sense read aloud, and it is yours.
• If you change platform, you change the redirect in five minutes and the stands keep working.
• You can also measure how many people scan, which the platform does not always let you see.
• And it is shorter, so the code needs fewer modules and the squares come out bigger.

Size

The diner scans sitting down, with the stand in the middle of the table: between 40 and 70 cm. Applying the rule that a code reads up to about ten times its side, 70 mm already has room to spare.

• Code: 70 to 90 mm a side. If what you want is a wall or window sign, that is another matter and it is in the oversized codes guide. At 90 mm it reads even from the end of a long table.
• Whole stand: 100 to 120 mm tall. That leaves room for the code, a title and a footer.
• Bigger than 130 mm starts to get in the way among the plates and people move it aside, which is the surest way for nobody to scan it.

The angle

A completely vertical stand makes people stand up. A flat one reflects the ceiling lights straight into the camera. The useful angle is between 15 and 25 degrees off vertical, and 20 is the value that works best at normal table height.

At that tilt the code sits perpendicular to the line of sight of somebody seated, and the ceiling light bounces up and back, not towards the phone.

One piece, no supports

The most practical design is a wedge: the code face tilted and behind it a plane resting on the table, all printed in one go. It prints resting on the back face, which is flat, so the code faces upward, no supports are needed and the colour change works on a clean layer.

Two-piece designs — plate and foot separate — give more scope visually, but in a restaurant the foot goes missing on day one.

Material

This is where real use overrules preferences:

Material	Advantages	Drawbacks
PLA	Easy, cheap, excellent matte colours, great detail	Deforms above 55 °C: no sunny terraces and no dishwashers
PETG	Survives heat and aggressive cleaning, does not turn brittle	Less fine detail, more shine, shrinks slightly more
ASA	The best for outdoors and direct sun	Needs an enclosed chamber and good ventilation

For indoors, matte PLA without hesitating: it reads best. For a terrace, PETG or ASA, and in that case it is worth making the code 15 % bigger, because the fine detail comes out less clean.

A terrace is outdoors, and that brings more than just the material: glossy PETG reflects the sun exactly when the customer brings the phone close, and pigments lose colour over one summer. What to plan for is in the outdoor guide.

Surviving the cleaning

In hospitality these pieces get wiped with a cloth and disinfectant several times a day, and that liquid works its way between the modules.

• Turn on ironing for the top face. It leaves the surface more closed, less dirt gets between the modules and it wipes clean in one pass.
• Go up to 4 or 5 top layers. If the infill sits close to the surface, moisture eventually gets in and the colour dulls over the weeks.
• 20 % infill is enough on this piece: it takes no load, it only falls over.
• Avoid very porous light filaments. Glossy white stains with coffee and wine astonishingly easily. Bone and light grey hide it far better.

What to write on the stand

The code alone is not enough: plenty of people do not know what will happen if they scan it, so they do not scan it. One line of text raises usage noticeably.

• «Menu» or «Our menu» above the code. Direct.
• Adding «Scan with your camera» helps more than you would think with older customers.
• If you have the menu in several languages, say so: «Menu · Carta · Speisekarte».
• The name of the place looks good, but do not compete with the code for space: the text goes outside the quiet zone, always.

There is a limit to how many letters fit before the printer stops drawing them with clean edges: on a 90 mm stand it is about 21, on a 70 mm one about 15. The sum is in the text on the piece guide.

How many per plate and what they cost

A 110 mm tall stand with a 2.5 mm base and 1 mm relief uses between 18 and 25 grams depending on the angle and the infill. With PLA at a normal price, that is pennies of material a piece.

On a 220 × 220 mm bed four fit per batch; on a 256 × 256, six. And since they all have the base at the same height, a single filament change covers the whole plate if the slicer is in layer-by-layer mode.

If you are going to mix stands with other pieces, or you want to know what a full plate weighs and how long it takes, the piece-by-piece layout for each bed is in the batch guide.

Before printing the batch

1. Print one and put it on a real table, under the light the place actually has.
2. Scan it sitting down, from the furthest chair at that table.
3. Test it at night, with the lights on: that is when it has the hardest time.
4. Hand the phone to somebody else. Let it be scanned by someone who does not know where to point.

If it passes those four, launch the batch with confidence. The full protocol, with the checks done on screen and in the slicer before spending a gram, is in the testing guide.