What is a kitchen display board?

What a kitchen display board is

In a kitchen without one, orders arrive as paper dockets: printed at the counter or written by a waiter, clipped to a rail, and pulled down when the dish goes out. A kitchen display board replaces the rail with a screen, usually a wall mounted display or a tablet at the pass. Each order is a card. Cards sit in columns that match the stages of the kitchen, typically New, Preparing and Ready, and a cook taps a button to move a card along, often called bumping it. The card carries everything the cook needs: each item and quantity, the options chosen such as size, milk or extras, any note, whether it is for a table, pickup or delivery, the table number or pickup time, and a timer showing how long the order has waited. Busy kitchens may run several screens, one per station, each showing only its own items.

How orders move across the columns

An order appears in New the moment it is placed or, for online orders, the moment payment is confirmed, so the kitchen never starts something that was not paid for. A cook moves it to Preparing when they start, which tells front of house the dish is under way. When it is plated it moves to Ready, which can trigger a call for the runner or a message to a pickup customer. The final step, often Served or Collected, takes it off the board. Each move is recorded with a time, which later shows how long dishes really take at each hour of the day. The screen updates itself, either by checking for new orders every few seconds or by receiving them as they happen, and older cards turn a warning colour as they age. Sold out items can be switched off in the menu at the same time, so new orders stop including them.

When a kitchen needs one

A display board earns its place when orders come from more than one channel at once: the counter, table ordering and online pickup. Paper from three sources gets mixed up; one screen keeps a single queue. It also helps when timing matters, such as a cafe with a morning rush where a five minute wait loses the next customer, or when modifiers are heavy, because printed dockets with long lists of changes are easy to misread under pressure. A small kitchen with one cook and a handful of orders an hour may do perfectly well with paper. The screen itself is cheap; the costs are a reliable network in the kitchen, a mount that keeps it out of grease and steam, and training staff to bump orders every time so the board reflects reality. A board that nobody updates is worse than paper, because front of house trusts it.

Common mistakes

Mounting a small screen where the cook cannot read it from the station, or using text and colours with poor contrast under bright kitchen lights. Showing allergies and notes in the same small type as everything else, so a nut allergy is lost in a list of extras; allergens and notes deserve their own line and colour. Not training staff to bump orders, which leaves Ready full of food that went out long ago. Letting the board show unpaid online orders, so the kitchen cooks for people who abandoned checkout. Running the kitchen screen on the same flaky wifi as customer phones. Having no fallback when the screen or network fails, such as a printer or a way to read orders on a phone. And never looking at the timing data, which is the board's quiet second benefit for rostering and menu changes.

Where it shows up in OneCraft

When a restaurant or cafe site is generated with ordering, the AI builds a kitchen board into the site's admin area from its menu guide: columns New, Preparing and Ready for today's paid or confirmed orders, each card showing items, options, table or pickup time and its age, with buttons that move the order's kitchen status and log the change. The board checks for new orders every 5 seconds rather than receiving them live. Orders are priced by a database function from the menu's own prices, never from the browser, and the menu admin has a Sold out switch per item. Card payment uses Stripe Checkout on the owner's connected account, which the free plan cannot do. Pushes to staff phones are not available, so the board is where the kitchen sees each new order.

Questions people ask