There are a few things in life that probably shouldn’t involve mortal danger. Changing a menu board is one of them.
For years, updating ours involved somebody climbing a ladder, standing on a rickety wall, wrestling a chalkboard off a couple of tiny hooks, and trying to hang another one without taking out themselves, the board, an entire bar of glasses, or an innocent bystander. The problem was we actually loved the boards. The team loved drawing them, customers liked looking at them, and they gave us somewhere to be creative. So replacing them with a generic Untappd menu felt a bit gross. We wanted the convenience of digital without sanding all the personality off.
That led us to Drew Bartlett, a local software designer who worked with our marketing and hospitality teams to build something specifically for us. The result is Syrup. At its simplest Syrup separates the menu information from the board design. We can update a beer name, ABV or description, or mark something sold out, and the connected screens change without anyone having to rebuild the artwork. The creative layer stays intact while the useful stuff underneath can move around as much as it needs to.
Behind the curtain Syrup runs on a PHP and Laravel backend, a TypeScript and Nuxt web app, with PixiJS rendering the boards on the TVs through WebGL. Which is a fairly elaborate way of saying that what our team draws is what actually appears on the screen. And the best part is no sending a staff member eight feet into the air on a ladder because someone drank the last pint of Four Quarterez.
Drew’s branding for the software came from somewhere much less technical. He grew up around old TVs and the brown and orange world of his grandparents’ basement. He still has an old television at home that throws up a rainbow test pattern when nothing is plugged into it, and those colors became part of the visual language for the whole thing. That fed into the retro TV logo, the palette and the slightly strange feel of the boards.
The name came from Vermont. Syrup. A simple nod to maple, to where it was built and to the fact that it lives around food and drink. The best part is that we didn’t have to choose between something useful and something with a bit of soul. The team still gets to draw, experiment and make the menus look like us. We just retired the acrobatic component of the job so everyone gets to go home in one piece.
Syrup is currently in early access and available to anyone else who likes the idea of digital menus without making their venue look like an airport departures lounge. Check it out at syrup.menu!
