A café menu machines can read: milks, pastries and the seasonal board

Why a café menu has to be words on a page

A question such as "does [café name] have oat milk" can only be confirmed from a line that says so. A photo of the chalkboard, a menu image in the social feed and a PDF from opening day hold the same words as pixels or as a separate file, and the PDF trap sets out what a fetcher receives from each. The café version of the fix is a menu page in HTML that a person reads and a machine parses in the same way.

In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, September 2026), 2.1% kept their real content in a PDF and 3.0% delivered their text only through JavaScript, which an AI crawler that runs no scripts receives as an empty page. Those shares are for the whole sample; the audit has no café cut. A menu that exists only as an image has the same problem.

Keep the designed version if customers like it. Link the PDF under the text, or show the photo of the board with alt text that says what it is. The words that answer questions go in the HTML. The rest of what a café's site states, beyond the menu, is on the café industry page.

Sections and items: how a café menu is laid out

Group the menu the way people order, with a heading for each section, and give every item a name, a price for each size and a short description where the name does not say what is in the cup. A section heading is somewhere a question can land: someone asking which teas you have should find a heading called Tea.

Write sizes the way the counter says them, and say once at the top what each one holds, in ounces or milliliters. A drink sold in two sizes has two prices on the page, and in the markup each size gets its own offer. A long menu reads well as a table with a caption naming it and the date it was last changed; a short one reads well as headed lists. Either survives being read as plain text, and an image does not.

Dietary labels in your own words, and the line about allergies

The dietary words on a menu are claims your café makes, so use your own and define each one once at the top: what you mean by vegan, what you mean by dairy-free, what "made without gluten ingredients" does and does not promise. Put the label beside the item in text. An icon with no word beside it is a picture, and a picture of a leaf states nothing.

Which of those words carry a legal meaning where you trade, and what they then require, is not something this article states for any country. Ask your local food authority before a regulated word goes on the board. What the page can always carry is the honest description: "made with oat milk", "no animal products in the recipe", "baked in a kitchen that also uses wheat, nuts and dairy".

End the menu with one line that sends allergy questions to people rather than to the page: "Our kitchen uses [list]. If you have an allergy, ask a member of staff before you order." It is a sentence an assistant can pass on to someone asking whether your pastries are safe for them, and it puts the answer with the people who can give it.

In the markup, MenuItem takes suitableForDiet, with values from schema.org's RestrictedDiet list such as VeganDiet, VegetarianDiet, GlutenFreeDiet and LowLactoseDiet. Use a value only where your own label claims exactly that, and leave it out where your label is more careful than the value. The text on the page is the café's statement; the markup repeats it and never says more.

Milks, sizes and extras in the markup

Milk questions come in many forms (oat, soy, almond, lactose-free, the charge for each), and the menu answers all of them in one place: a section listing every milk and its price or "no charge". MenuItem has a property for exactly this: menuAddOn, which takes a MenuItem or a whole MenuSection of add-ons, so every espresso drink can point at one Milks section instead of repeating it.

Give that section an @id and refer to it from each drink, as the template below does. When you add a milk or drop one, you change one list and every drink follows. Sizes work through offers: one MenuItem for the flat white, with an Offer for each size carrying its own name, price and priceCurrency.

The seasonal board: adding an item and retiring it

Seasonal items go up in a hurry, and their removal is easy to forget. That is how a winter drink ends up on a menu page in July. Give each one a start and an end when it goes up:

1. Add the item to a Seasonal section with its dates: "from [date], until [date] or while it lasts".
2. In the markup, give the item's Offer an availabilityStarts and an availabilityEnds date matching the page.
3. Change the menu's "last updated" date on the page.
4. On the day it ends, take it off the page, out of the markup, off each delivery app and off any listing that shows your menu, in the same hour.
5. If it returns every year and people ask for it by name, leave one line in the Seasonal section: "[Drink name] returns in [month]."

The last step is the honest version of keeping a page alive. Someone asking in March whether you still have the winter special should hear no, and a line that says when it comes back gives them a reason to return.

The template: a café menu in JSON-LD

This block describes the café as CafeOrCoffeeShop and attaches the menu with hasMenu, which the type inherits from FoodEstablishment. The sections and items are schema.org's Menu, MenuSection and MenuItem types, each item with its offers and price. Every value in brackets is a placeholder: replace each with what your page says, and leave out any line your page does not state. It is structured data in JSON-LD, placed in the page's HTML.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "CafeOrCoffeeShop",
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/#cafe",
  "name": "[Café name, as on your sign]",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "telephone": "[the number that rings at the counter]",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "[street and number, unit if any]",
    "addressLocality": "[city]",
    "postalCode": "[postal code]",
    "addressCountry": "[country code]"
  },
  "hasMenu": {
    "@type": "Menu",
    "url": "https://www.example.com/menu",
    "hasMenuSection": [
      {
        "@type": "MenuSection",
        "name": "Espresso drinks",
        "hasMenuItem": [
          {
            "@type": "MenuItem",
            "name": "Flat white",
            "description": "[what is in the cup, as the page says it]",
            "offers": [
              { "@type": "Offer", "name": "[small size]", "price": "[price]", "priceCurrency": "[currency code]" },
              { "@type": "Offer", "name": "[large size]", "price": "[price]", "priceCurrency": "[currency code]" }
            ],
            "menuAddOn": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/menu#milks" }
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "MenuSection",
        "@id": "https://www.example.com/menu#milks",
        "name": "Milks and extras",
        "hasMenuItem": [
          { "@type": "MenuItem", "name": "Oat milk",
            "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "[price, or 0 for no charge]", "priceCurrency": "[currency code]" } },
          { "@type": "MenuItem", "name": "Extra shot",
            "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "[price]", "priceCurrency": "[currency code]" } }
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "MenuSection",
        "name": "Bakery",
        "hasMenuItem": [
          {
            "@type": "MenuItem",
            "name": "[pastry name]",
            "description": "[your label, in your words, as on the page]",
            "suitableForDiet": "https://schema.org/VeganDiet",
            "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "[price]", "priceCurrency": "[currency code]" }
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "MenuSection",
        "name": "Seasonal",
        "hasMenuItem": [
          {
            "@type": "MenuItem",
            "name": "[seasonal drink]",
            "offers": {
              "@type": "Offer",
              "price": "[price]",
              "priceCurrency": "[currency code]",
              "availabilityStarts": "[YYYY-MM-DD]",
              "availabilityEnds": "[YYYY-MM-DD]"
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Three checks before it goes live. Every item in the block is on the page, at the same price. Nothing in the block claims more than the page, a diet value included. And the block is in the HTML the server sends, not added later by a script. Google's structured data guidelines put the first two in their own terms: markup describes the visible page and must not mislead.

The block carries no rating: a café's own business node leaves reviews out of its markup, for the reasons in café reviews and listings. Nor is the block a lever for being named. It is a precise second copy of the page, for any parser that reads one.