Delivery apps have turned every restaurant into an e-commerce business. Your menu photos are your shop window — and a burger photographed on a busy kitchen counter loses out to one on a clean, appetising background.
When cut-outs work for food
- Single items like burgers, drinks, desserts, boxed meals
- Menu boards and printed menus where dishes sit on a brand colour
- Social media posts with bold colours and text
- Combo images that put several items together
When they don't
Dishes that are mostly sauce, soup or a flat plate don't benefit much — the plate is the shape, and the food is inside it. For those, a styled top-down photo usually works better than a cut-out.
Shooting food for cut-outs
- Shoot at the angle people eat from — about 45 degrees for most dishes, straight-on for burgers and drinks.
- Use daylight, never the kitchen's overhead fluorescent lights.
- Shoot quickly. Food looks best in the first two minutes.
- Wipe the plate edges. Drips show up more on a clean background.
Steam, glass and drinks
Glasses and transparent drinks cups are tricky — you can see the old background through them. A good background remover keeps glass partly transparent, so the new background shows through naturally. Steam usually disappears in cut-outs; add it back in design if you need it.
Try it on the background remover.
Consistency is the real win
Pick one background colour for your menu and use it for every item. On a delivery app, a consistent set of photos looks like a well-run kitchen.
FAQ
Can I remove backgrounds from photos of my whole menu at once?
Yes — drop up to 20 photos at a time and download them all as a ZIP.
Do delivery apps allow edited photos?
Generally yes, as long as the photo represents the real dish. Check each platform's photo guidelines.
