No One Orders ‘Mystery Meat’: Delivery App Photo Issues
A Saturday night hangout sparks a shared, oddly specific craving for Jamaican oxtail stew. The group turns to a delivery app in search of the dish.
The first images that pop up? Beef stew and gumbo. Close, but no cigar.
So the crew queries a competitor and sees this:
The sauce, sweet and savory, glistens in bright room lighting. The deep browns of the table mesh well with those of the oxtail, and contrast with the white of the plate in-between them. The dish says eat me and the photo captures that.
Ask:
- Which app gets the business? Not just for one stew, but the whole group.
- Which app plants a revenue-generating memory of satisfaction in the minds of consumers?
It’s obvious.
Of course this is a hypothetical, but it maps onto a common situation that happens day after day for delivery apps: the critical outcomes of photo-based competition between them.
DoorDash, EatStreet, and Instacart have proven that there’s a way for food delivery apps to achieve excellence in this area.
Let’s discuss it.
Photography Selection for Food Delivery Apps
Competition is not limited to long-tail queries. Even a generic interest in pizza is subject to rivalry for satisfying latent, specific cravings that can be brought out with sharp signals from sellers.
As is commonplace, the Caribbean restaurant in this hypothetical is on a variety of platforms. The winning food delivery app satisfied consumers because it had a fantastic photo with accurate metadata tagging.
Industry participants know that photo quality is important for conversion. Adding photos to menu items can increase sales. Figures vary:
The exact conversion lift will depend on evolving competitive factors, in addition to the photos themselves:
- The client restaurant’s offering
- The consumer side in the relevant market, and
- The menu offerings and photo quality of competing restaurants in the relevant market.
But the effect of photo quality, everyone can agree, is significant.
It will continue to be significant. There has been an 11% increase YOY in consumer reliance on food photos, according to a DoorDash 2024 trends report.
So what makes for a quality photo? Let’s start with what doesn’t make for quality photos.
- Stock photography
- The hands of an amateur
- A lack of food-specific experience
High-converting photos should be created specifically for the menu item in question.
This holds true for:
- Photographer-created photos, and
- AI-generated photos.
Visual AI technology has advanced to a point where restaurants can have hyper-realistic images that cover gaps in the menu.
Anyone can take a photo, but few can create a quality still and take it to the finish line. This holds true in food and drink, where intense competition puts expertise at a premium.
Thus photographer selection matters. They should be:
- A professional
- With expertise in food and drink photography
- Who shows up on time
- Who brings their own equipment
Technology is also important. Image preparation and editing makes a big difference. Differences primarily depend on:
- The technology
- The skill of the person doing the editing
This is a lot of work to put on the plate of restaurant owners. The best of them struggle in this notoriously competitive industry.
A Leadership Opportunity for Food Delivery Apps
The image gaps on food delivery platforms beg for a solution. The starting point is ownership of the problem.
When consumers go on these apps, they see the app’s brand first. They are primarily judging its performance, less so the host of restaurants with which it partners.
A birds-eye survey of food and drink images on food delivery apps reveals inconsistency. This damages the app’s brand.
When food delivery apps don’t meet consumer standards, they suffer:
- Lower trust
- Fewer sales
- Lower net promoter scores
The truth is that quality and operations teams at food delivery apps can do more for restaurant partners.
This is especially true for:
- High-performing, smaller kitchens
- Niche restaurants, like the Caribbean example
- Innovative teams trying out experimental offerings
The thing is, food delivery platforms don’t just need a few photos. They need a lot of them. That introduces a scaling problem.
The Difficulty of Getting Quality Food Photography in Large Quantities
Popular delivery apps have quite a few restaurant partners and most of them could use better photos.
Photos are necessary not only for restaurant onboarding but also updates as restaurants change menus.
Different types of photos include:
- Single items
- Promotions and packages
- Images focused on cross selling, for example appearing at checkout
Let’s continue the Caribbean example.
The group who queried Jamaican oxtail stew may want a package deal. They’ll see the stew at the center bottom of the photo, but also seven other dishes. In addition to a goat dish, chicken is served in various ways: classic Jamaican jerk, curried, or inside of flaky pastries to the bottom left.
This multi-item photo puts Caribbean meat-based dishes on display for eaters to anticipate. Plantains, fried and sweet, finish out the meal with a nice aftertaste.
This is the sort of imagery that drives conversion in a marketplace swimming with options.
Scaling Food and Drink Photos
In an ideal world, every food and drink photo is optimized. Shooting for realism, it would be excellent for top-notch photos to appear on the first several scrolls for both the home page and for the most popular queries.
Food delivery platforms, facing this huge demand, have had to deal with three basic problems:
- Gaps in geographic coverage of available, qualified photographers
- Delays in getting stills from photo shoots out the door
- Delays in post-production quality control
A classic problem in economics is the firm’s decision to either do something in house or outsource it. In this case, an in-house solution could either be amateur work from employees who are meant to do other things, or bringing professional photographers in.
Circling back to an earlier discussion, amateur photography doesn’t work in this market. It’s too competitive. The in-house solution of hiring photographers also doesn’t work in part because the equipment is expensive.
As for the outsourcing side, building a network of contractors is difficult.
To access superior rates from contractors, it’s necessary to supply substantial amounts of work and with stability. To do this across multiple markets requires even more photographer work as well as superior administrative and technological oversight.
Unfortunately, this endeavor is complex. It requires a niche provider. Teams at food delivery apps understand this sort of concept all too well. Otherwise restaurants wouldn’t accept platform fees and split shares of the monetary pie.
Specific obstacles include:
- Vetting photographers
- Coordinating shoots
- Calculating rates and keeping them predictable
- Handling rebookings and scheduling issues
- Post-production quality control
- Technology for uploading, storing, tagging, searching, editing, and publishing photos
- Staff whose full-time jobs are to focus on all all these issues, including customer support
In this environment, it’s a rarity for restaurants and delivery apps to get photos quickly.
Generative AI for photos
In the event that a food delivery app wants to plug certain image gaps in restaurant menus without incurring the higher cost of working with photographers, generative AI provides a cost-effective but still quality alternative.
Consider an example. If a healthy fast casual spot doesn’t have photos for some of its sides and desserts, it can use visual generative AI to produce a photo like this:
The photo shows off the deeper reds and purples of the grapes. It also lets the eyes wander to the fresh-looking cookies off to the right. It’s simple and does the job.
Whether images from photographers or an AI are needed, there is a niche provider that can handle—does handle—the relevant obstacles for food delivery apps.
In addition to DoorDash, EatStreet, and Instacart, other marketplaces facing similar issues of scale use Snappr Workflows. This includes:
- eBay
- Expedia
- Cars & Bids
More broadly, 73% of the Fortune 500 and 48% of the A16Z Top 100 Marketplace use Snappr Workflows and receive affordable, transparent rates (though each package is custom).
Let’s understand how.
Snappr Services for Food Delivery Apps
Quality and operations teams know what they need for food listings:
- Speed
- Quality, and
- Standardization
They can have these things. This is a full-service operation.
On-demand photo shoots
Snappr’s network of photographers covers 90% of the globe’s English-speaking population.
It takes two minutes to book a shoot. Snappr finds the right photographer and handles scheduling, including communications and rebookings.
Photo shoots can be booked with 24-hour notice. The same is true for changes to shoots.
Photo quality
Snappr photographers for food and drink are vetted. Snappr locates the best possible matches for requested shoots.
Customers and the Snappr team collaborate to produce detailed shoot guides, which are provided to the photographers. They are punctual and bring the necessary equipment.
Snappr does quality control work immediately after the shoot.
Editing is powered by Snappr’s proprietary AI.
Creating food and drink images from scratch with AI
Given an enterprise-level discount, a food delivery app can generate a polished in-use product photo using Snappr AI for an effective per-photo price of $1 of a product in use. This includes a revision. Photos of items without a background or as part of a collection cost less or more credits, respectively.
If a competitor AI produces a superior image, Snappr will continue iterating until it wins.
With this option on hand, food delivery apps can leverage existing budgets to fill menu gaps and lift sales.
Technology features, including metadata tags
Snappr integrates with all the top visual content tools. It is simple to receive and send files, for example.
All visual assets are stored and searchable.
Complete and accurate metadata tagging is easy to create.
Search for and view details about shoots, completed and active, as well as any other workflow, in the same dashboard.
User-generated content can be uploaded, tagged, and edited at scale.
Pricing
Snappr provides enterprise customers with credits.
Credit costs for photo shoots, editing activities, and AI image generation, are predictable.
Net pricing is cheaper than working with photographers individually, both in house and as contractors, and much cheaper than creative agencies. This is in part because enterprise discounts apply.
Paying customers keep copyright to their photos forever.
Inconsistent Photo Quality Doesn’t Have to Be a Problem Anymore
In-house approaches and studios can’t give food delivery apps what they need.
Snappr can. It’s been tested.
Try a demo. Reach out to the Snappr team.
