AI-generated food images are showing up on Toronto restaurant menus, and customers hate them

Walk past restaurant windows and sandwich boards across Toronto and you'll spot something increasingly common: food images that look artificial, with geometric textures and an unsettling sheen. Customers are sharing photos online describing the images as cartoonish, rubbery, and surreal—often calling them "slop."

One Reddit user seeing breaded shrimp and gyros on a CNE board wrote: "This looks like what aliens would put in a presentation about what Earth food is." Another customer described a sandwich board as "uncanny and nauseating." Toronto customer Cynthia Lem said: "I feel like it's really inauthentic and it doesn't make me wanna go eat at your restaurant."

Some restaurants are using AI to enhance or generate food photos partly to cut costs. According to a Restaurants Canada survey, 41 per cent of surveyed members are operating at a loss or breaking even—and rising fuel costs are worsening margin pressure. Professional food photography is expensive and out of budget for many small restaurants, according to David Pullara, a marketing professor at Schulich School of Business.

The Fancy Induced Burger is taking a different approach. Marketing manager Fez Mian photographs burgers as they come out of the kitchen, then runs them through AI applications like ChatGPT to enhance texture and freshness rather than generate images from scratch.

Pullara said AI use in food imagery isn't inherently bad if done thoughtfully. "Great food photography sells. So if you're using AI to generate an image that's terrible, it's going to hurt your sales, it's going to hurt your brand," he said. "I don't think it's the AI that makes the image unappealing. I think the problem is asking AI for a photo and just not using a common-sense filter about whether this actually looks good."

Restaurant-goers rely heavily on imagery to decide what to order, Pullara noted. The practice has drawn enough attention that it has become noticeable to diners—a sign that cost-cutting through AI has crossed into territory that damages rather than helps business.