Zomato Bans AI-Generated Food Images to Maintain Customer Trust

Food delivery platform, Zomato has announced a strong stance against the use of AI-generated images for food dishes in restaurant menus, citing customer trust concerns and negative impacts on business. 

In a post by Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal, the company revealed that AI-generated images have led to customer complaints, resulting in higher refund rates and lower ratings for restaurants.

“We urge our restaurant partners to avoid using AI for dish images in restaurant menus from now onwards — we will actively start removing such images from menus by the end of this month. And will stop accepting AI generated dish images (as much as we can detect them using automation),” said Goyal.

Zomato is urging its restaurant partners to cease using AI-generated images for their menu items. The company plans to actively remove such images from its platform by the end of the month and will leverage automation to detect and reject AI-generated images as much as possible. 

Restaurant owners who have not yet invested in authentic food photography are encouraged to contact Zomato's catalogue support team to arrange professional photo shoots. This service is provided at cost, with no profit margin for Zomato.

The ban on AI-generated images extends to Zomato's marketing team, which has been instructed to avoid using such images in promotional materials. 

Zomato has been aggressively investing in generative AI and has a dedicated role – head of generative AI – led by Vaibhav Bhutani, where he is working on couple of interesting use cases, including a multi-agent system for suggesting food options and enhancing user engagement and experience and more. 

Zomato recently launched a "Group Ordering" feature, allowing users to share a link with friends and family to add items to a shared cart. This feature aims to simplify the process of ordering food for groups, eliminating the need to pass phones around to collect everyone's order. The feature is being gradually rolled out to users.