Why are food images so important for your digital menu?

A menu is a key that connects a restaurant with its customers. Adding beautiful imagery to it can make a whole lot of difference!

With the threat of a complete shut-down hanging over all the restaurants and food businesses due to current circumstances, many have found technology to be their ultimate hope. Restaurants are heavily relying on digital assets to secure orders.

However, getting online and having a digital menu doesn’t guarantee sales. What guarantees sales are the images of the dishes that you put next to each item. Today’s customers want visual proof of satisfaction before they shell out money from their pockets. In the era of live demos and 100% no satisfaction cashback deals, patrons, whether dining-in or ordering-in, follow the visual stimulation to order food.

According to a report, digital menus can increase a restaurant’s sales by 25%-30%, but a digital menu with beautiful imagery the percentage skyrockets to 65%. Here are a few ways food images can add to the bottom line:

Help customers make informed choices

Lamb curry with pistachio sauce and toasted bread may not be prepared and presented in the same way in all restaurants.

Surprises may be pleasant, but seldom when it comes to food. Therefore, having food imagery for each item on the menu will help customers make a quick, and well-informed purchase. They’ll be confident about their order and would look forward to savoring the final delivery.

In case, you don’t have a budget to get a professional shoot done, you can always use your smartphone to click pictures. These days, most smartphones offer decent quality pictures that can be directly used for digital assets.

Increase Your Customer’s Appetite and the Ticket Size!

Let’s talk science?

Whenever your customers receive a visual stimulus, a hormone called ghrelin gets released in their bodies. Ghrelin is responsible for telling your brain how much food you want. Seeing a food photo causes it to quickly enter your bloodstream, which results in flared up appetite.

If you’re not taking advantage of this little fact, you’re making a big mistake. Because some restaurants have been able to increase their ticket size by 30% and all they did was use food images along with textual descriptions in their menu.

In simple words, getting a glimpse of dishes helps generate far more interest and engagement than the list of ingredients.

Beat your Competitors’ Text-Based Menus

If your competitors are still selling with text-based digital menus, you’re golden. Iowa State University found that 70% of the people respond to food images as if they have a plate of food right in front of them. That means even if your competitors are selling the same thing you are, people will most likely buy from you after seeing pictures of your food items.

Another way you can use this response to your advantage is by putting images of extras and up-sells beside items on the menu. For example, by sticking a divine looking salad with most of the items on your menu as an extra, you can encourage customers to add more to the final order.

Looking for an Online Ordering System that supports menu pictures?

I recently came across a restaurant website, Straw Hat Pizza. Apart from having an intuitive website, they also had strategically placed images of all of their dishes on the menu. Clean shots, beautiful angles, and detailings — no one could dare leave the website without placing an order (refer to the image below).

The best part? The website did not take even a single second extra to load images. They were optimized well for a quick ordering and checkout process.

Straw Hat Pizza’s ordering website is powered by FreshBytes, an online ordering system that proves a comprehensive solution to your digital needs. Their powerful system utilizes state-of-the-art technology that allows multiple image uploading, without slowing down your website.

With just a few clicks, you should be able to upload the images of every dish along with its price and other relevant information. And once your customer clicks on something, the picture enlarges to fill up the screen and deliver a better visual impact.

So, why delay? Integrate food images in your digital menu now!