7 most common Thuisbezorgd food photo mistakes and how to fix each

Most underperforming Thuisbezorgd listings do not lose orders because the food is bad. They lose orders because the photos are wrong in a way the operator never sees, since the operator looks at their menu on a 27-inch screen and the customer looks at it on a 5-inch one. We pulled the seven mistakes that come up most often when we audit accounts on the Just Eat Takeaway side of the platform, with the fix for each.

The published spec is the baseline. Everything in this post assumes you have already read our breakdown of the Thuisbezorgd photo specs, which covers dimensions and file format. The mistakes below sit on top of those rules, in territory the official guidelines do not document.

Mistake 1 on Thuisbezorgd: yellow tint from bad white balance

Restaurant kitchens are lit with tungsten or warm LED, both of which sit around 2700K to 3000K. A phone left on auto white balance under that light pushes the orange channel hard, and the dish ends up looking like it was photographed through a tea bag. We see this on roughly four out of ten accounts we audit.

The fix is mechanical. Move the dish to a window with indirect daylight between 10:00 and 14:00, or set a custom white balance in your camera app using a sheet of white paper. If the photo is already shot, drop the temperature slider by 800 to 1200 Kelvin in the Photos app or Lightroom. A neutral white plate should look white on the screen, not cream, not amber.

Mistake 2 on Thuisbezorgd: hands or fingers in the frame

The most common version is a thumb at the edge of the plate from someone holding the dish steady. The second most common is a server's hand reaching in to garnish. Just Eat Takeaway's published guidelines list hands as prohibited content directly, and the moderation team enforces it, per Just Eat Takeaway's partner guidelines.

The fix is a tripod or any flat surface that lets the dish stand on its own for two seconds. If you are shooting overhead, the phone goes on a small tripod with the camera arm extended over the plate. If you are shooting at 45 degrees, the phone leans against a salt shaker. The dish does not need help to sit on a plate.

Mistake 3 on Thuisbezorgd: raw ingredients prominent in plate shots

A raw chicken breast next to the finished schnitzel does not read as transparency, it reads as food safety risk. The same applies to raw mince beside the cooked burger or whole raw fish next to the plated dish. The Just Eat guidelines mark raw ingredients as prohibited unless they are clearly separate and not prominent, which is a high bar.

The fix is to either stage the raw ingredient as a deliberate background element (a sprig of fresh thyme, a few peppercorns, never raw protein) or remove it entirely. If the dish needs context, garnish with the cooked or served form: a wedge of lemon next to the fish, not a whole fish next to the fish.

Mistake 4 on Thuisbezorgd: multiple dishes on a single-item slot

The platform separates single-item uploads from bundle uploads for a reason. A photo with three dishes uploaded against a single curry will get either rejected at moderation or quietly downweighted in search, because the customer ordering one curry sees a misleading image. We see this most on family restaurants that photograph their full table once and reuse the image across every menu item.

The fix is one dish per single-item slot, and the bundle slot for combos. If you want a hero image showing variety, that is what the 16:9 bundle photo is for. The single-item 3:2 frame should contain exactly the dish on its menu line.

Mistake 5 on Thuisbezorgd: low contrast at thumbnail size

This is the silent killer. A photo that looks fine on a 27-inch monitor disappears at 200 pixels wide, which is roughly the size of a search card on a mobile screen. Dark sauce on a black plate, beige curry on a beige napkin, white risotto on a white surface: the dish blurs into the background and the customer scrolls past.

The fix is a contrast test. Open the photo on your phone, pinch out until it is 200 pixels wide on screen, and squint. If you cannot identify the dish in 1.5 seconds, the photo fails. The remedy is usually a different surface (a dark slate under a white risotto, a wood grain under a beige curry) or a tighter crop that gives the food more of the frame.

Mistake 6 on Thuisbezorgd: watermarks and text overlays

We still see logos, restaurant names, prices, and "NEW" badges layered over the food. Sometimes the photographer adds them. Sometimes the operator adds them in Canva before uploading. The Just Eat guidelines prohibit watermarks and text overlays explicitly, and Thuisbezorgd shows the dish name and price in the listing UI itself, so anything you bake into the image is duplicate noise.

The fix is to upload the clean photo and let the platform handle text. If you have an existing library of watermarked photos, the clean version is usually still in your camera roll or on the photographer's hard drive. If not, regenerate. Pasting a watermark over the food and assuming nobody will notice is a guaranteed way to get the listing downweighted.

Mistake 7 on Thuisbezorgd: 4:3 photos in a 3:2 slot

This one is purely technical, and it is everywhere. Most phone cameras default to 4:3, so an unedited iPhone or Android shot lands at 4032 by 3024 pixels. Upload that to a slot expecting 3:2, and the platform crops top and bottom or letterboxes the image. Either way the framing the photographer chose is gone, and the food usually ends up off-centre or partially clipped.

The fix is to crop to 3:2 before uploading. In the iPhone Photos app: edit, crop, aspect ratio, 3:2. In Google Photos on Android: edit, crop, free, then drag to 3:2. Shoot wider than you think you need so the crop has room to breathe, and check that the dish is centred after the crop, not before.

How to apply these Thuisbezorgd fixes across a full menu

Going dish by dish through a thirty-item menu and reshooting takes most of a weekend, and that is before the editing. The realistic options are a one-day photographer session at €500 to €1,500 for a stable menu, or AI generation per dish.

FoodPic.ai is built around the second option. You photograph each dish once with your phone, the AI fixes the white balance, removes hands, isolates a single dish per frame, and exports at the 1200 by 800 ratio Thuisbezorgd expects. The Menu Scanner takes a paper menu, extracts every dish, and queues a generation for each one. Most thirty-dish menus finish in under an hour, including review.

We are not going to claim AI is the right answer for every restaurant. A tasting menu with seasonal plating deserves a real photographer who understands the dish. For a weekday delivery menu of fifty items that turns over twice a year, the speed advantage matters more than the quality ceiling, and the seven mistakes above stop being an issue because the AI never makes them.

Three free credits is enough to fix one dish and compare the result to whatever is on your listing now. That is the cheapest test we know of for whether the photos are the bottleneck.