Search "AI food menu" and. Look. Away.

 

Type "AI food menu" into an image search. Then make sure no children are in the room. What comes back is sci-fi of the uncomfortable kind. 

 

This is AI menu slop. 

 

It's everywhere, and everyone (incl. your guests) have noticed.

 

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A leading food delivery company launched an AI generated image feature to fill in gaps on their platform... and it produced this *hilarious* result for "Jacket Potato". In the sad world of AI slop, this is actually hilarious (but that's it, that was the only exception. The rest is terrifying.). 

 

The impossible angle. A steak shot from a place no camera, and no guest, could ever stand; floating mid-air, lit from everywhere at once.

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We can see the full plate, so was this steak shot from above? But there is a slight left angle. So why is the broccoli (?) fully visible on the right? We will never know. And we don't need to know. Because this steak does not exist.

 

The yellow tint. A warm, amber haze over every dish, as if the whole kitchen was permanently stuck in the Breaking Bad series' universe. 

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This is not limited to food & beverage menus, but AI generated image tend to exaggerate warm tones. And the available pool of image AI is trained on is increasingly AI-generated, an unsettling loop of ever-yellow pictures emerge. But hey. I guess it's the right colour palette to match that duck on the top left of the picture?

 

The identical bistro. Every menu now looks like every other menu. The neighbourhood trattoria and the globalised airport bar, served by the same machine.

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I have seem these croissants everywhere by now. Asia, Middle East, US, Europe, my nightmares. Everywhere.

 

The menu nobody wrote/reads. "A symphony of sun-kissed heirloom tomatoes, lovingly embraced by a whisper of artisanal basil." No one would ever write that. And no one will read that.

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As a general rule: if you don't have time to write it, no one will take the time to read it. 

 

If only it were just ugly...

If your menu is 100% fake, you will break trust. And in healthcare you will break more. A patient on a texture-modified diet or with a declared allergy, needs the menu to be exact (ie. 0 hallucinations). 

As we wrote in Modern Menu Design in 2026, "paper is a rebellion"; chalkboards and hand-lettered specials are back. Some operators would rather return to pen and paper than be seen next to a yellow-tinted lasagne-thing.

 

Where Menutech stands

But the answer cannot be to reject technology altogether. At Menutech, it is impossible for our clients to place felt letters on a board by hand across multiple sites, languages or diet menus. There is no need to choose between slop vs. scissors.

What we do well is control: the scope and speed of automation for food and beverage menus, at scale.

  • Automation that respects the brand. Your layouts, fonts and styles stay yours, on every menu and at every site.
  • Automation that respects the recipe. Allergens, diets and textures come from your data, not from a model's guess.
  • Automation that respects the contract. Rules follow your sites, your service levels and your clients' requests.

We achieve this by prioritising rules over speed. Imports and designs follow rules built for each client, and submenus for diets, sites and services are derived from the main menu automatically. 

-> The machine only does human-verified repetitive work.

 

On Menutech, and beyond: here's what to do instead

  1. Take a stance. Slop is the beige middle of every style at once. Choose quiet or loud: "Bold or quiet, but never vague." (Modern Menu Design in 2026)
  2. Keep your culture. A generated trattoria looks like every other trattoria. A real menu says to guests: "This is who we are." (Modern Menu Design in 2026)
  3. Never lock text into a picture. AI menus often bake prices into the image itself; one change, and the whole thing is redrawn. "Avoid locking text onto images." (Why Your Menu Is a Maintenance Nightmare)
  4. Build a system, not a one-off. Grids, consistent typography and worst-case tests make a menu that survives Tuesday. "Design for change." (Why Your Menu Is a Maintenance Nightmare)
  5. Move at the speed of service. "Hospitality doesn't run on 'next quarter.' It runs on tonight." (Modern Menu Design in 2026)

In an age of all-powerful AI, what matters most are the people around us. Whether you use Menutech or something else, make your menus with your heart, and your guests will appreciate it. <3

Co-funded by the European Union
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Menutech is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 826923.