Why Your Deliveroo and Just Eat Photos Are Losing You Orders
Let's start with the number that should be making every takeaway and delivery kitchen owner slightly furious.
Deliveroo takes somewhere between 25 and 35% commission on every order placed through the platform. Just Eat and Uber Eats are in a similar territory. For every £20 order that comes through, somewhere between £5 and £7 goes straight back to the platform before you've paid for the ingredients, the staff, the packaging or the electricity.
You already know this. You agreed to it because the alternative (not being on the platform at all) is worse. The delivery app audience is enormous and you need access to it.
Which makes it even more baffling that so many independent restaurants and takeaways are handing over that commission every single day and then undermining the whole arrangement with listing photos that make their food look worse than it tastes.
The thumbnail is doing more work than your entire menu description
When someone opens Deliveroo or Just Eat on a Friday night, they're not reading. They're scrolling. They're looking at thumbnails, making split second decisions about what looks worth ordering, and moving on within seconds if nothing catches their attention.
Your listing photo is the first thing they see. In many cases it's the only thing that determines whether they click through or keep scrolling.
A blurry photo taken on a phone under fluorescent kitchen lighting is not going to stop that scroll. A clean, well lit image of your actual food, looking the way it looks when it goes out at its best, will.
The gap between those two things is the gap between an order and a scroll past. Multiply that by however many times your listing appears in a search on a busy weekend and you start to understand the scale of what poor photography is actually costing you.
Why delivery app photography is different to restaurant photography
There's an important distinction worth making here between photography for a restaurant's own website or social media, and photography specifically for delivery app listings.
For your own channels; Instagram, your website, printed menus, you have creative latitude. Moody lighting, dark backgrounds, atmospheric shots with props and context all work brilliantly and can be really effective at communicating the personality of your venue.
For delivery app listings, the brief is much more specific. The images display at small sizes, often on a phone screen, often in a grid alongside ten or fifteen competitors. Dark backgrounds and atmospheric styling that looks beautiful on a large screen can become muddy and unreadable at thumbnail size.
What works on a delivery app is clean, clear and simple. A light or white background that makes the food pop. Good natural or artificial lighting that shows the colours and textures accurately. The dish front and centre with nothing competing for attention.
It's not the most creative brief in the world but it's an important one; because those images are working harder commercially than almost anything else in your marketing mix, given the volume of people seeing them every single day.
What this looked like in practice — Plan Burrito, Loughborough
Earlier this year I shot some delivery app focused menu photography for Plan Burrito in Loughborough; a quick test shoot, clean white backgrounds, the key menu items shot specifically to work as listing photography.
No stylist, no elaborate setup, no half day production. The food came from the kitchen as it normally would, we worked with a clean background and good light, and the results were images that actually do the job they need to do at thumbnail size.
That's what most takeaways and delivery focused restaurants actually need; not a big expensive production, just someone who understands what the platform requires and can execute it cleanly and quickly.
The platforms are nudging you toward better photography anyway
It's worth knowing that Deliveroo in particular has been increasingly prioritising listings with professional photography in their search algorithm. Listings with high quality images rank higher in search results within the app, which means more visibility, which means more orders.
So it's not just about conversion once someone sees your listing. It's about whether they see your listing at all.
Just Eat has similar functionality and Uber Eats has invested heavily in their own photography programme for partner restaurants, which tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the platforms themselves take this.
How much does delivery app photography actually cost
Less than one bad weekend of underselling your food on a platform that's already taking 30% of every order.
A two hour shoot covers most menus comfortably; key dishes, clean backgrounds, images delivered and ready to upload. For most independent takeaways and delivery kitchens across the Midlands that's genuinely all you need.
If you're based in Derbyshire there's a local rate that brings the two hour shoot to £200. For anywhere else across the Midlands the standard rate is £250.
No licensing fees on top. The images are yours to use on every platform, forever.
A quick note on Just Eat specifically
Just Eat's listing photography requirements are slightly different to Deliveroo's; they have specific image size and quality guidelines that your photos need to meet to display correctly. Worth checking the current requirements on their partner portal before your shoot so we can make sure everything is sized and formatted correctly from the start. I'll always ask about this before a delivery app focused shoot.
The honest version
You're already spending money to be on these platforms. You're already giving up a significant percentage of every order. The photography is one of the few things in that arrangement that you actually have control over; and it's one of the few things that directly affects whether those platform fees are working for you or just disappearing.
It doesn't need to be complicated. It doesn't need to take all day. It just needs to be done properly.
If you're running a restaurant, takeaway or delivery kitchen anywhere across the Midlands and your listing photos aren't doing your food justice; get in touch → and let's sort it out.
Or have a read of why Derby restaurants need professional food photography → if you're still on the fence.