Why AI Food Photography Isn't a Recipe for Brand Success
Whether you are walking down the snack aisle at the grocery store or ordering up lunch on DoorDash, you’re now faced with a whole new question:
Is the picture of the food I'm buying real, or is it AI?
Food brands, big and small, are jumping on the AI bandwagon, and as designers, we have feelings about it.
For this post, we connected with an expert: our creative colleague, Carrington Crothers, of Prospect Street Studio. Carrington specializes in product photography and shared some helpful perspectives on AI’s impact on food photography and the brands that use it.
What has changed about food photography in the last 50 years?
Carrington started with a brief history of modern food photography. She taught us that in the 1980s and 1990s, food stylists and food photographers worked together to capture images of food in its most idealized state. These were the days of mashed potatoes standing in for ice cream and Elmer's glue for milk.
Then, in the late 2000s and 2010s, everyone suddenly had a camera in their pocket. Food blogs were popping up across the internet, and restaurant-goers started Instagramming their food before taking a bite.
Around the same time, professional food photographers moved away from the tricky substitutions and toward reality. They instead relied on props and staging to highlight the appeal of actual food.
Now, AI is creating entirely fake food images that often miss the mark.
“When I photograph a burger, I prop it up to ensure it looks three-dimensional in a two-dimensional photo. But it’s still a real burger, made of actual ingredients. And my goal when I stage it isn’t to get further from reality but instead to get closer to what it will look like on your plate,” Carrington explains. “Even stock images start with real food. When you use AI though, you’re marketing something made purely of pixels.”
We’ve noticed that AI image generators often give food impossible qualities like:
Cheese that doesn’t melt quite right
Fruit that floats atop yogurt in physics-defying ways
Cornbread that doesn’t crumble when it’s cut
Misplaced or odd ingredients and garnishes
Even while some studies suggest a preference for AI food images, many people feel unsettled or manipulated by these "just-a-little-bit-off" representations.
Why does real matter when it comes to food photography?
One of our biggest issues with AI food photography is that it doesn't treat your customers with respect. Instead, it tries to sell them something that doesn't even exist.
This type of deception gets particularly problematic when it comes to food. Eating is an incredibly intimate experience. Choosing to consume what you're selling requires your customers to put a lot of trust in you. It's a betrayal of that trust to market to them with images that aren't of your food (or of any food for that matter!). No one wants to feel tricked into putting something into their body they didn't anticipate.
When you use AI-generated photos to promote your food product, you also rob people of the information they need to make decisions.
“Some customers may decide not to buy from you at all, worried you are hiding something,” Carrington says. “Others may purchase or order expecting what you’ve shown them only to be disappointed when reality doesn’t match up. Either way, the experience harms your brand by eroding trust.”
If you believe in the quality and taste of what you’re putting out into the world, you should be confident enough to show it authentically.
Is AI food photography worth consumer backlash?
We talked with Carrington about a recent story that made news in our region.
Adam Jones owns Myer's Bagels, a well-loved small business in Burlington, Vermont. Recently, he tried to spice up his social media marketing with AI photography. While the images did incorporate some real elements, even the AI enhancements and the falsified backdrops sparked major uproar from loyal customers.
One-star reviews started popping up on Google immediately. Meanwhile, social media commenters shared opinions like this one from eri.scarlet.pendragon: “Using generative AI for advertising a product is deceptive because that’s not what the product actually looks like, it’s not real, but it’s pretending to be, so people have every right to be angry.”
If AI-enhanced photography caused this much upset, you can imagine how these same customers would have felt if the images were entirely AI-generated!
Why is real food photography a better choice for your business?
In addition to supporting the work of photographers, Carrington highlighted these three benefits of skipping AI when it comes to food photos:
Strengthening Your Brand Identity
One of the primary goals of brand photography is to help your brand stand out. So when you generate an image of a pizza slice that could have come from anywhere, it’s not serving your goal. Meanwhile, quality food photography can establish your brand’s vibe and make your pies the ones that people crave on a Friday night.
“Shortcuts just don’t sell,” explains Carrington. “People are getting more discerning by the day. When it’s clear that your photos aren’t real, it makes them less relevant and they lose their power as a marketing tool.”
Eliciting an Emotional Response
Too much fake perfection can keep customers from falling in love with your product's natural allure. The messy browned edges of a casserole trigger a sense memory that makes you hungry. There's magic in a real scoop of loose-leaf tea. But all of that emotion and delicate beauty often gets lost in AI translation.
Fostering Trust and Loyalty
When you share AI images of food, you set your customers up for disappointment. There's no way you can deliver on the promise of the photo if the food in the photo doesn't exist. Show that you believe in what you're serving by sharing the real thing in its best light. This strategy is the way to go if you want to build trust and goodwill with your audience.
Our parting advice, after consulting with a photography pro:
Trust in your menu and products, invest in showing them off right, and don’t let AI undermine your restaurant or food brand’s success.
