Gesto digital menu statistics

What this covers

The data covers the twelve months from September 2025 to September 2026 and 173 venues — 168 in Bulgaria, 4 in Malta and 1 in Spain. Among them are restaurants, pizzerias, bars, cafés and hotels; no breakdown by venue type is kept, so none is given here.

The five venues outside Bulgaria account for 15,000 to 20,000 opens in total — under 1% of everything. Practically the whole picture below is Bulgarian.

For a Bulgarian venue that works out at roughly 14,900 opens a year, or 41 a day. A single user opens a menu 2.8 times on average over the period.

These figures describe Gesto's venues, not the Bulgarian market. They are not a sample and they are not weighted — simply everything that passed through the platform.

More than half the venues have been here five or six years

Of the 168 Bulgarian venues, over 100 have been with Gesto for five to six years — more than half. Gesto has been on the market since 2016.

This is the figure that says most about the product itself. A digital menu is something the venue sees every day: if it gets in the way, it is dropped quickly. A subscription renewed for a sixth consecutive year is a stronger signal than any testimonial.

We do not count churn and do not publish a retention rate, because it is not tracked systematically. "Over 100 of 168" is what is known for certain.

Every eighth guest is from abroad

Of 901,022 users, 120,022 are on a device outside Bulgaria — 13.3%. The largest countries:

One clarification, without which the figure is read wrongly: this is the country of the device, not a language the guest chose. A German in Sofia counts as Germany, whether they read the menu in German or in English. How many people actually switch language is a different metric, and it is not here.
The venues outside Bulgaria make no appreciable difference — they are under 1% of opens, so the share holds for the Bulgarian venues alone.

The practical conclusion: at a venue with this profile, every eighth guest comes from abroad. On a paper menu that means either a separate print run per language, or service with explanations. On a digital one it is a setting.

Two peaks a day — and an almost even week

Through the day, opens cluster around 12:00–13:00 and 19:30–20:00 — lunch and dinner, which is expected.

The distribution across weekdays is more interesting, because it contradicts the assumption that hospitality is a weekend business:

The gap between the strongest day and the average is about 5%. Wednesday — an ordinary working day — sits exactly at the average and is third busiest. In other words the digital menu is not mainly a Friday-and-Saturday thing; it works roughly the same every day.

For the venue that means the menu is an everyday tool, not a weekend shop window — and its content has to be right on a Wednesday too.

How often menus change

• Every day — venues with a daily or lunch menu change it daily.
• At least two or three times a year — price changes when supplies get more expensive.

On paper the first is impossible without printing every day, and the second means two or three full menu reprints a year.

The switch to the euro: no reprint

Mandatory dual pricing in leva and euro ran from 8 August 2025 and ended on 8 August 2026. From 9 August prices are shown in euro only.

For venues on paper menus that meant two reprints within a single year — once to add the second currency, once to remove the lev.

In Gesto the prices themselves did not change. The lev value came off with a single setting — no re-entering prices, no printing.

This is a display operation, not a recalculation. The rate is fixed at 1 euro = 1.95583 leva.