What's Shipping Next: menu-MENA Roadmap for the Next 14 Days
By menu-MENA Team
Published on May 4, 2026
How we ship
menu-MENA ships weekly. The team is small, the stack is fast (Next.js, Firestore, Cloudflare R2, PDF.js), and most of what restaurants ask for goes from request to live in 7 to 15 days. This is the roadmap for the next 14 days. Each item below has a target ship date and a short note on which restaurants asked for it. If you want one of these features sooner, the path is the usual one — sign up for the 14-day free trial at menu.mena-x.com, poke at the dashboard, and tell us what would help. The roadmap is shaped by what restaurants are actively trying to do.
Everything below ships on the existing 90 EGP/month or 1,000 EGP/year plans with no extra charge. Multi-branch chains keep the 50% off each additional branch.
Digital loyalty stamp cards
Target ship: 7 days
Guests collect stamps in WhatsApp after each order. After a configurable threshold (say, 8 stamps), they receive a reward message — free dessert, a fixed discount, or a custom prize the restaurant chooses. No app to install, no plastic card to lose, no scanner at the counter. The stamp count is tracked against the WhatsApp number that placed the order.
Asked for by: a Maadi family restaurant chain that wanted to retire their paper punch cards, and a Zamalek dessert spot trying to convert one-off tourists into repeat locals.
Allergen filter on the storefront
Target ship: 8 days
The storefront gets a filter bar with toggles for nuts, dairy, gluten, vegetarian, and vegan. Toggling "no nuts" hides every menu item tagged with the nuts label in real time. The filter is purely client-side, so it is fast even on slow 4G. The labels themselves come from the existing dietary tags already populated in the 1,100-item catalog, so most restaurants do not need to do any tagging work.
Asked for by: an Alexandria seafood spot getting frequent shellfish-allergy questions, and a Sheikh Zayed brunch cafe with a high vegetarian guest mix.
Per-item view and order analytics
Target ship: 10 days
Two numbers per item per branch: views (guests who opened the item detail) and orders (guests who actually sent it through WhatsApp). The gap between views and orders is the conversion signal. A dessert with 200 views and 5 orders needs a better photo. A grill platter with 50 views and 30 orders is doing the work. Sortable, exportable to CSV, with a per-branch toggle for chains.
Asked for by: a koshary chain trying to figure out which add-ons to push, and a Levantine grill that suspected its menu photography was inconsistent across categories.
Tableside "call waiter" button
Target ship: 11 days
A second floating button next to the WhatsApp FAB. The guest taps it, the dashboard receives a silent ping with the table number, and the kitchen or floor staff sees a small badge in the orders tab. No sound on the guest's phone, no awkward shouting across a busy room, and no need for the guest to look around for a server during peak hours.
Asked for by: a Sheikh Zayed restaurant with a large outdoor terrace where servers cannot always see hand signals, and a Maadi cafe whose owner wanted to reduce the visible wait-staff workload during ramp-up.
Custom domain support (BYO domain)
Target ship: 13 days
Point your own domain at menu-MENA — menu.yourrestaurant.com, qr.zamalekgrill.com, whatever fits. Drop a CNAME pointing at our edge, menu-MENA provisions an SSL certificate automatically, and your storefront serves under your domain instead of the default menu.mena-x.com subpath. Guests see your brand in the address bar.
Asked for by: established restaurant brands that want their QR landing page to read as "us" rather than "menu.mena-x.com/our-name."
Seasonal menu scheduling
Target ship: 14 days
Each menu version gets an optional date range. Schedule a Ramadan iftar menu to auto-appear on the first night of Ramadan and revert to the standard menu after Eid. Schedule a summer Sahel menu to run only between June and September. Each branch can run its own schedule, so a Cairo location can stay on the standard menu while the Sahel branch flips seasonally.
Asked for by: every restaurant that has manually swapped a Ramadan menu in and out for the past three years, plus the Sahel-only beach grills that close for nine months and reopen.
Bulk WhatsApp templated replies
Target ship: 15 days
Saved replies for the kitchen, wired into WhatsApp Business. "Ready in 15 minutes." "Out of okra today, can we substitute molokhia?" "Rider is on the way." One tap from the dashboard sends the templated reply to the guest's WhatsApp thread, with order context auto-filled. Cuts the average reply time during peak hours and removes the typo risk on long Arabic phrases.
Asked for by: a delivery-heavy koshary spot in Heliopolis whose order operator was retyping the same three sentences a hundred times a night.
Print-friendly PDF export of digital menu
Target ship: 15 days
Export your live menu-MENA menu as a printable PDF. Useful for take-away inserts, hotel room directories, banquet handouts, and as a backup if the Wi-Fi at a venue is unreliable. The export respects your current pricing, your overrides, your soft-deletes, and your branding. Not the same as PDF mode (which renders an uploaded PDF as a flipbook) — this is the inverse: turn your live digital menu into a printable file.
Asked for by: a hotel-restaurant in Hurghada that wanted both the digital QR menu and a printable take-away version that always matched.
Key takeaways
- menu-MENA ships weekly. The next 14 days bring 8 features.
- Loyalty stamps via WhatsApp ship in 7 days; allergen filter in 8.
- Per-item analytics ship in 10 days; tableside call waiter in 11.
- Custom domains arrive in 13 days; seasonal menu scheduling in 14.
- Templated WhatsApp replies and a print-friendly PDF export both ship in 15 days.
- Everything is included in the existing 90 EGP/month or 1,000 EGP/year plans, with 50% off each additional branch and a 14-day free trial with no credit card.
If one of these features is the reason you would or would not start your free trial, the simplest move is to start now and have the feature land while you are still inside the trial window. Sign up at menu.mena-x.com.