Self-Service Kiosk Menus for Food Pantries

A food pantry lobby has a lot of different people walking through it before the doors open. Volunteers arrive for their shift. A neighbour wants to drop off a donation. Someone heard about Saturday’s community dinner and wants to sign up. A family needs the intake form.

Until now, a Muin kiosk did one of those jobs at a time. You could rotate a tablet between screens, but the visitor had to wait for the right one to come round. Menu mode gives the tablet a Home screen of big tiles, and each visitor picks what they came to do.

What a pantry lobby menu looks like

The Food Pantry Lobby starter menu has five tiles:

Tile	What happens
Volunteer check-in	Lists today’s volunteer shifts. The volunteer picks theirs and taps their card.
Donate	Opens your giving screen, with tap-to-pay on the tablet.
RSVP to an event	Lists your upcoming free events. The visitor enters their name and email.
Forms	Lists the forms you have published for kiosk use, such as an intake or volunteer application.
About us	A signage screen about your organization.

You build it under Devices & Kiosk > Kiosk Configs > Create Config. The template asks which of your existing kiosk configs each tile should open, or creates new ones from starters. Everything is created in one step, or nothing is, so a half-built menu never reaches a tablet.

Tiles can be relabelled in Arabic, Urdu and Spanish, and visitors switch language from a pill on the Home screen.

Volunteer check-in with a tap

A volunteer who already has a card enrolled walks up, taps Volunteer check-in, picks today’s shift and taps the card on the reader. The tablet says “Welcome back” with their first name and returns to Home a few seconds later. No sign-in sheet, and nobody has to find the clipboard.

A volunteer without their card can search their name instead. The screen shows a partly hidden email or phone number so they can confirm it is them without anyone else’s details showing.

If the menu also takes card payments, pair an ACR1555U reader for check-in so donations and check-ins don’t compete for the tablet’s built-in NFC. Staff pick the reader from the staff panel behind the exit PIN and run a test tap.

Volunteering from the lobby

Add a Volunteer with us group of tiles and the same tablet recruits volunteers too:

• Become a volunteer opens your volunteer application form. The visitor fills it on the tablet, or scans a QR code and fills it on their phone.
• Volunteer calendar lists your public shifts for the next two weeks. The visitor picks a shift and a role, enters their name and email, and is signed up, or put on the waitlist when the role is full. A shift that needs a waiver or an approved application shows a QR code so the visitor finishes on their phone.
• Check in now lists only shifts starting soon, from 30 minutes before the start by default, so volunteers are not scrolling past tomorrow’s shifts.

Any form on the menu can offer Scan to fill on your phone, which keeps the line moving and keeps personal details off the shared screen.

A clean screen for the next person

Lobby tablets see a stream of strangers, so the menu is built around clearing up after each one.

• A bar at the bottom of every screen holds Back, Home and Cancel in the same place.
• When someone walks away mid-form, the tablet asks “Still there?” and gives them 20 seconds before it clears the screen and goes back to Home.
• Going Home clears what the visitor typed, the name they searched for, who they were recognized as, and the language they picked.
• While a card payment is in progress the bar is locked, so a donation is never cut off halfway.

Knowing which tiles get used

The device page in the console shows a Menu use card: taps, completions and early exits per tile for the last 7 days. The tablet records tile ids only. No names, no titles and nothing a visitor typed.

What you need

• A tablet running version 1.0.17 of the Muin Go app or newer. Older tablets are refused a menu with a message saying so, and they update themselves during quiet hours.
• Volunteer cards enrolled on your volunteers’ records, for tap check-in.
• An ACR1555U reader if the same tablet also takes tap-to-pay.
• No managed tablet needed. An admin can set up any Android tablet or iPad from Settings → Kiosk Mode in the Muin Go app, and pin the app so visitors can’t leave it. Tap-to-pay on the Donate tile needs an Android tablet with NFC; on an iPad, donors give by QR code, and MIFARE Classic volunteer cards need an external card reader.

The full setup, including every message a visitor or operator can see and what to do about it, is in the Kiosk Menu Mode guide. For the rest of what a Muin kiosk does, see Kiosks.