I built an AI tool for restaurant food photos. Here’s the service business model around it.
There are 15 million restaurants in the world.
Most of them have terrible food photos on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Google. Not because the food is bad. Because nobody taught them how to shoot food, and hiring a photographer runs $500-2000 per shoot.
The model:
- Find restaurants with bad delivery app photos (takes 20 minutes on DoorDash)
- Send them a free enhanced sample of one of their existing dishes
- Charge $200-500 to enhance their full menu
- Retain them monthly for new items and social content
One person with a laptop can realistically serve 20-30 restaurants.
I built a tool specifically for this called Plateable. Same dish, nothing generated, just properly lit and staged using AI. Takes under 2 minutes per photo.
I can share a before/after in the comments if anyone wants to see it.
Happy to answer anything about the model or how the tool works.