What happens when a brand prioritises the efficiency of artificial intelligence over the accuracy, authenticity and quality of its customer experience?
I’ve been an avid user of the Just Eat app for many years, as an early adopter in my student days I was excited by the ease and direct access to a variety of take away options right to my doorstep. Long gone were the days of a junk draw stuffed with garish leaflets, take-aways with little to no online presence that you were lucky to find a menu for and prepared to pay in cash for. (& hoping for correct change!) Just Eat successfully created a platform that connected take-aways to new customers. A smooth customer experience, that brought peace of mind to the transaction, with features like uniform, clear menus and delivery tracking. (A USP back in the mid 2010s)
So as a loyal customer of more then a decade you can imagine my shock this year when booting up the app on an empty stomach, I was greeted by some rather unsettling imagery that only increased my nausea. At first I laughed it off thinking it was a minor ‘Ai Slop’ moment but as I came across more uncanny food images my appetite diminished further, with some image bordering being outright off-putting (brown sauce anyone?). 'This can’t be happening. I thought, do the businesses realise the effect this will be having on people? I closed the app and decided to see what leaflets I had in the drawer.
While these examples may be funny at first glance, they illustrate a more serious problem: the AI was generating plausible-looking visual interpretations of text, rather than reliably documenting the actual food a restaurant prepares. This could create unrealistic expectations and mislead users.
A particularly interesting contradiction is with Just Eat's new brand campaign, ‘Stay Just Where You Are’ created with advertising agency VCCP. A conceptually strong campaign moving the brand towards a more emotional proposition: helping people spend more time enjoying the moments that matter by delivering food and everyday essentials. The disconnect is notable, within days of this carefully orchestrated campaign for humanity, Just Eat is making headlines for its AI-generated menu images.
Food images are more than decoration. Customers use them to understand what they're buying. When a platform substitutes an invented image for the actual product, the visual information becomes less reliable. Even an attractive AI image could undermine confidence if it misrepresents the dish.
An unappealing image can create negative associations before customers experience the food itself. It could affect their perception of both the restaurant and Just Eat. It may also discourage customers from choosing a perfectly good dish.
The restaurants may not have created the imagery, yet their products and reputations are displayed alongside it. This creates a shared reputational risk, particularly for smaller businesses that depend on visual appeal and customer reviews.
The absurd images have spread across social media and attracted national press coverage. Once the public starts creating its own narrative around a brand's mistakes, the company can find itself responding to the conversation rather than leading it.
A company can carefully control its advertising, typography, messaging and visual identity, but if the imagery within its core product experience is inconsistent or inappropriate, it weakens the overall impression of quality. Every touchpoint contributes to the brand.
A brand isn’t simply what it tells people it stands for. It’s what people consistently experience. The problem with Just Eat’s AI food imagery isn’t simply that some pictures look ridiculous. It’s that the company introduced artificial representations at a point in the customer journey where authenticity matters. Generative AI can create an image that looks delicious, but is a image customers should trust? When businesses use AI to represent real products, visual accuracy becomes more than a creative consideration. It becomes a question of brand integrity.
Following widespread criticism of bizarre and inaccurate food images a Just Eat spokesperson put out the following statement:
"We want partners on our platform to show photos that accurately reflect their dishes so that our customers can be confident in what they are ordering and happy when their food arrives. We work with tens of thousands of small restaurants on their food imagery, including funding professional local photographers."
“We've been trialling AI-enhanced images and as with any new technology, it isn't always quite right the first time. We're sorry for any inaccurate images that have been posted. We're in the process of removing them and have paused rolling this out while we further develop the tool to ensure it best serves our partners and customers."
Sources: Independent, Reddit, Grocery Gazettee
