How Many Takeaway Menus Should I Order?

It's the question every takeaway owner asks before placing a print order — and the answer depends on more than just how many houses are in your area. After 20 years of printing menus for UK takeaways, here's the honest breakdown of how to choose the right quantity.

Why quantity matters more than you think

Takeaway menu printing uses offset printing at volume, which means the price per menu drops sharply as the quantity goes up. The machine setup cost is the same whether you print 5,000 or 50,000 — so every extra menu you print costs almost nothing more. This is why ordering more than you immediately need almost always makes financial sense.

Quantity	A4 price (both sides, 130gsm)	Price per menu
10,000	£425	4.25p each
20,000	£650	3.25p each
40,000	£900	2.25p each
100,000	£1,800	1.8p each

At 10,000 you're paying 4.25p per menu. At 40,000 that drops to 2.25p — almost half the cost per unit. If you're going to need 40,000 menus over the next year, printing them in one run is cheaper than two runs of 20,000.

Start with your delivery area

The most common way to work out a starting quantity is to count the number of households in your target delivery area and match your print run to that.

• Small local area (1–2 mile radius): typically 5,000–10,000 households. A run of 10,000 lets you do a full initial drop with a few thousand spares for in-store, local businesses, and a top-up drop later.
• Medium delivery area (2–4 miles): typically 15,000–30,000 households. A run of 20,000–25,000 covers your patch and leaves enough for repeat drops to your best areas.
• Larger city coverage: 40,000–100,000 depending on how aggressively you want to cover the area.

Factor in how often you reprint

Most takeaways reprint menus once or twice a year — either because prices change, the menu gets updated, or the current stock runs low. If you update your menu regularly, order a quantity you'll go through in 6–12 months rather than stocking up for 2 years. Holding large quantities of menus that become outdated is a waste.

If your menu rarely changes (steady dishes, stable prices), you can order more in one go and get the benefit of the lower per-unit price.

Don't forget spares beyond door-drops

Menus don't just go through letterboxes. Think about:

• In-store: A stack on the counter and one in every bag adds up over months
• Local businesses: Hotels, offices, and community centres keep takeaway menus — a hundred here and there adds up
• Repeat drops: New residents move in constantly. A second pass of your best streets 6 months after the first is standard practice for busy takeaways
• Breakages and waste: Rain, damaged boxes, rejected letterboxes — add 10–15% for wastage on any door-drop

The minimum order — and why it's 10,000

Our minimum order is 10,000 menus. Below that, offset printing becomes uneconomical and you'd be better off with digital printing — which costs more per unit and doesn't achieve the same colour quality. 10,000 is the floor for getting genuinely cheap, high-quality menu printing.

If you're a new takeaway just starting out, 10,000 A4 menus at £425 is a sensible first order. It gives you enough to do a solid door-drop of your immediate area, keep a stack in-store, and still have some in reserve.

Our recommendation by takeaway size

• New or small single-location takeaway: Start with 10,000. See how quickly you go through them, then decide whether to scale up next time.
• Established takeaway with a regular delivery area: 20,000–25,000. Enough for a full drop plus repeats without over-stocking.
• Multiple locations or wide delivery area: 40,000+. The economics are compelling at this scale — you're paying less than half what you'd pay for multiple 10,000 runs.
• Chain or franchise: 100,000+. Call us and we'll work out the best price for your volume.

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