Three o'clock on a Saturday, and the queue is eight deep. The person at the front is not asking about ice cream. They are asking whether the vegan scoop is made in the same room as the pistachio, because that decides whether their daughter can have it. Behind them, someone else is asking whether the salted caramel is still there, because the board in the window says it is and the tub is scraped clean. Neither question is on the price board, and both are asked at the busiest thirty seconds of the day.
A scoop shop's paper does one job well — the price of a scoop — and three jobs badly: it cannot say what is in the tubs this morning, it cannot say what has sold out since, and it cannot hold an allergen table per flavour without turning into a laminated wall of small type. A page can do those three, and it costs nothing to publish.
Three questions, three update speeds
The reason a single sheet of paper fails is not that it is badly designed. It is that the three answers change at different rates, and paper can only be printed at one of them.
- The price of a scoop changes about once a year, when the supplier's invoice moves. This is the one thing a printed board is genuinely good at, and it should stay printed.
- What is in the tubs changes every morning, and sometimes at two in the afternoon when the lemon runs out and the fig goes in.
- The allergen answer does not change at all — it is the same table every day — but it has to be readable, in writing, at the moment someone asks, including when the shop is staffed by two people and the queue is out of the door.
An owner who tries to solve all three with one sheet reprints constantly, and a laminated board with yesterday's flavours taped over today's is the usual result. The fix is to stop treating them as one job.
Price the scoop, not the flavour
The arithmetic is the reason. Twenty-four tubs multiplied by three sizes is seventy-two price cells, and no shop maintains seventy-two cells. But a customer does not buy “pistachio”; they buy “two scoops”, and the flavour is a choice made inside that purchase. So the price table has one row per size and the flavour list carries names only — which also means a new flavour added on Friday costs nothing to price.
Four columns is what reads on a phone without pinching: the size, the cup price, the cone price and the note that stops the next question. The figures below show the shape of the table — they are a layout example, not a market average, because this article has no dated survey behind it and a shop should print its own numbers:
| Size | Cup | Cone | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| One scoop | $4.50 | $5.00 | Cone and wafer add 50 cents; both are printed, not decided at the till |
| Two scoops | $6.00 | $6.50 | The row most people order — put it in the middle, not last |
| Three scoops | $7.50 | $8.00 | Where the family order lands; the one that needs a tray line |
| Kids' one scoop | $3.00 | $3.50 | Say the age or say the scoop size — an unstated rule is an argument |
| Pint / 1 L tub | $9.00 / $12.00 | — | Take-home is the margin; it deserves a row, not a question |
Under the table, the two lines that kill the rest of the ambiguity: the topping price, and what a tub is when it is packed to order. Both are small numbers that a customer cannot guess and a staff member should not have to invent at the till.
One line worth printing under the table: “Prices are for the ice cream; the cone, the toppings and the tub are listed above.” It answers the second half of every price question before it is asked, and it costs one line.
The allergen table is the part that has to exist in writing
This is where a scoop shop differs from every other counter on this site's list. A hair salon's price sheet can be approximate. An allergen list cannot, because the person reading it is deciding whether their child can eat what they are about to buy, and “I think it's fine” is not an answer a staff member should have to give across a busy counter.
Two frameworks cover most of the shops this article is written for, and an owner will recognise which one is theirs:
- EU and UK: the fourteen allergens in the food-information rules have to be declared for non-prepacked food as well as packaged food, and written information must be available at the point where the food is sold — which is why a folder behind the counter is normal and why “ask a member of staff” alone is not the whole obligation.
- US: nine major food allergens — milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and, since 2023, sesame — with the same practical consequence: the answer has to be written down somewhere the customer can be pointed to.
Neither paragraph is legal advice, and the rule that applies is the local one; a shop should confirm its wording with its own authority. What is not in doubt is the shape of the table, because it is the shape the question arrives in: one row per flavour, one column per allergen the shop actually uses, filled with yes, no, or “may contain”. A gelateria that uses six bases and one nut paste has a short table; one that makes everything from scratch has a long one. Either way it is per flavour, not per shop.
| Flavour | Milk | Egg | Gluten | Nuts | Soya | Sesame |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanilla bean | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Dark chocolate sorbet | no | no | no | may contain | may contain | no |
| Pistachio | yes | yes | no | yes | no | no |
| Salted caramel, cone | yes | yes | yes | no | may contain | may contain |
The rows above are an illustration of the format, not a claim about anyone's recipe, and the columns should be whatever the shop actually handles — a shop that never uses sesame can drop the column, and one that uses four nut pastes should say so in the cross-contact line rather than in a column called “nuts”.
Two sentences belong under the table, in the shop's own words:
- Cross-contact, stated plainly. “All our ice cream is made in one kitchen that also handles milk, eggs, wheat, peanuts and tree nuts. We cannot promise any scoop is free of traces.” That sentence is not a disclaimer; it is the truth the customer needs and the staff already know.
- Where the written list lives. “The full written allergen list is at the counter — ask and we will read it with you.” This is what makes the page and the paper work together: the page answers the question before the queue, the folder answers it at the till, and neither one is a guess.
A board that changes daily, and a code that does not
The daily rotation is the part that makes a printed flavour list absurd. Six or eight tubs, one or two of them rotating, a seasonal flavour that arrives on Thursday and is gone by Sunday — an owner who prints that is printing twice a week, and the second print is always slightly wrong.
So the split is: the flavours live on the page, the prices live on the wall. The chalkboard by the counter still says which six are open today, because a chalkboard is the fastest editor in the shop. What the page adds is the version that answers at 11pm from a phone in a hotel room, and the version that can say “sold out” without a staff member wiping the board mid-queue.
And this is why the code must hold the address rather than the flavour list. A photo of the board, or a PDF of the week's menu, is uploaded to a new address each time it changes; a printed code pointing at the old address is a dead link by Saturday. A page keeps its address, so the code on the window keeps working after the tenth flavour change — which is the same arithmetic that decides every other printed code on this site.
Said plainly: the page does not make the board unnecessary. A chalkboard in the shop is still the best display for the six flavours twenty steps away. The page is what the customer reads before they leave the house, and what the staff point at when the answer is three sentences long.
Three pieces to print, measured
The print files this site produces are measured, not estimated, so the sizes below are the actual millimetres of the PDFs, at error correction M with a four-module margin (33 modules of code plus the margin, 41 squares across):
| Piece | Sheet | QR code | Reads at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Counter card | 93.0 × 127.5 mm | 48 mm | about 0.5 m — the person paying, phone already out |
| 70 mm sticker | 70 mm round | 40 mm | about 0.4 m — hand height, where somebody is standing still |
| A4 window poster | 210 × 297 mm | 126 mm | about 1.3 m — nose against the glass, looking in |
The distances come from the industry rule of thumb of one unit of code per ten units of distance — a rule for a clean, matte, well-lit code and an ordinary phone camera. It is not part of the QR standard (ISO/IEC 18004), and it is a floor rather than a guarantee: behind glass that reflects a bright street, under gloss laminate, or on a sheet that has bowed in a damp shop, plan for one per eight and expect the phone to take a second longer.
Three placement notes matter more in a scoop shop than in most shops. The window poster belongs behind the glass at eye height, not taped to the outside where it is wiped, rained on and sun-bleached within a month. The counter card belongs where the queue's second person can read it while the first is paying — that is the person with time to scan. And the 70 mm sticker belongs at hand height on a surface that stays dry; a freezer lid that gets wiped between servings, or a napkin dispenser, is a better home than the door, because 40 mm of code reads at 0.4 m and the door is read from further away than that.
What this page does not do
It does not take orders, take payment, print a receipt, run a loyalty card or talk to the till. Those are separate systems with their own monthly prices, and this article does not quote them: their pages change every month, and a price without a date is a rumour. The three-year cost calculator on this site exists precisely so a shop can put its own monthly figure in and see what a subscription adds up to, rather than read a number invented here.
What the page replaces is the paper that keeps going out of date and the four sentences a staff member repeats: the flavour list in the window, the laminated allergen sheet with a flavour crossed out in marker, the “do you have the lemon today?” reply, and the “how much is three scoops” that has to be answered across a busy counter.
The cost of the paper, dated
| Option | Price | Renews? | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free page | $0 | never | one live page — flavours, scoop prices, allergens, hours, tap-to-call, a visit count |
| Turnkey kit, no tables | $49 once | never | live page + 8 files: delivery note, A4 poster, QR image, print price sheet, Business Profile kit, edit runbook, review cards, bring-a-friend cards — built by hand, within 24 hours |
| Turnkey kit, with tables | $89 / $149 once | never | the same files plus the six table pieces, two revisions and, at $149, ten social cards |
| Till, loyalty or ordering app | its own monthly price | monthly | payments, stamps and orders — not the flavour list on the window |
No subscription, no account needed to order, and the price depends only on how many tables there are to print for. A window-only gelato kiosk has none, so it takes the eight-file version at the same price as the fifteen-file one — the six table-only pieces come out and nothing else changes.
An afternoon, in five steps
- Write the scoop table first. Four sizes, the cone difference, the topping price, the tub. If a row needs a sentence, it belongs in the note column, not in a footnote.
- Do the allergen table before the flavours. One row per flavour, one column per allergen the shop actually uses, and the cross-contact sentence written by the person who makes the ice cream.
- Type the shop once. Name, Maps link or address, hours, the flavours open today and the scoop prices. The page takes the same lines the printed sheet uses, so there is one source of truth.
- Publish, then scan it at the real distances. Window poster from the pavement at a metre and a half, counter card at half a metre, in the light the shop actually has at eight in the evening.
- Print one piece before the batch. A code that fails on one window fails on fifty. Put the poster behind the glass where it will live, scan it twice — once standing back, once close — and only then order the rest.
One page, one code, printed once
The page is free and takes about thirty seconds: the shop name, a Maps link, the scoop prices and today's flavours. The printed kit is one payment — $49 for the eight-file version a kiosk with no tables needs — written by hand and delivered within 24 hours, with no subscription behind it.
Related notes
- A bakery's daily menu page — the same daily-change problem, solved for bakes that sell out by ten.
- A market stall's price list that changes every Saturday — the weekly version, with one permanent code.
- How big the QR code has to be, in millimetres — the printing floor, the quiet zone and the 1:10 rule explained.
- The three-year cost calculator — put a monthly builder or app figure in and see the total.
Sources
Read on 14 November 2026. This site's prices — $0 free page, $49 / $89 / $149 one-off kit — are the published figures on /showcase/order. Print geometry — the 93.0 × 127.5 mm card with a 48 mm code, the 70 mm sticker with a 40 mm code, the A4 poster's 126 mm code, the four-module quiet zone and the module counts — was measured in the PDFs generated by this site's print kit (work/tools/en_print_kit.py, error correction M, four-module margin), not estimated. The printer floor of about 0.17 mm per module, the four-printer-dots-per-module recommendation (0.33 mm at 300 dpi) and the four-module margin are from Denso Wave's QR FAQ; the quiet zone as four times the X-dimension also appears in GS1's 2D Barcodes at Retail Point-of-Sale Implementation Guideline. The 1:10 code-size-to-scan-distance figure is an industry rule of thumb, not part of ISO/IEC 18004. Allergen rules are described as the two frameworks an owner will meet — the fourteen-allergen list for non-prepacked food in the EU and UK food-information rules, and the nine major food allergens of US federal labelling law, with sesame added from 2023 — without quoting article numbers or interpreting either for a particular shop; this article is not legal advice and the local rule is the one that applies. Scoop pricing and daily rotation — the scoop-count table, the cone difference, the sold-out mark — are described as practice: no survey is quoted, and the figures in the table are a layout example rather than an average, so a shop should print its own numbers.