AI Background Swap for Holiday Season Themed Café Menu

Wiki Article

Being a relatively new small café owner in operation for just over 2 years, I quickly realised that the way food and drink is presented visually is vital (especially in today's Instagram/TikTok world). Even if I have created the most scrumptious menu options, if photos taken of them are dull on the digital menu or don't look appealing on social media, most likely no one will be interested in trying them. The holiday season is the highest volume time of year for the majority of cafés for increasing sales, and utilizing AI this year helped me to make my food photos look better without needing to pay for professional photographers.

For my café, which only has 25 seats and a small team, I have limited funds for marketing. In addition, the holiday menu is limited to a couple of weeks for maximising profit on holiday-themed items prior to trends changing. If I were to follow the traditional method of photographing food, the process would entail: hiring a professional food photographer (costing between 5-8 million rupiah), renting props, and holiday-themed decorations (between 2 and 3 million rupiah), or photographic items independently (and achieving mediocre outcomes).

It cost me a lot of money last year because I learned the hard way that hiring a low-cost photographer was not always the best choice. Although I did get some photographs that were far better than my cell phone pictures, they still were not good enough to warrant the amount of money I spent. Perhaps, the most significant issue I had was that when it came time to update my menu or add a new item in the middle of the season, I could not do that because the photographer was already booked with other projects. Re-scheduling time for him would have meant more money than my budget allowed.

Also, food photography is very technical. In order for food to look appealing, the lighting has to be perfect, the background should complement the item and not overpower it, and the composition has to look professional. All of these are skills that take years to learn how to do well. I'm a barista and chef, not a photographer.

Practical Solution: AI Background Swap

A significant advancement was made in terms of the marketing of my café when I discovered Visboom, an AI-driven roof installer offering a background change function for food images, particularly those that fall under the theme of seasonality.

My new process has become much easier and more inexpensive. As a result, I now spend my time on what I can control, which is producing a beautiful final product of the dish for image generation from the café background using a plain non-patterned surface such as a white marble countertop or a blank/invisible-looking wood surface (all of mine), and maximising light sources by using natural sunlight.

The main lesson I learned is that artificial intelligence cannot improve poor-quality presentation or styling of food. Therefore, it is important to plate correctly, present the food as the best it can be (garnishes must be fresh), the style to be appealing, and once this is complete, Visboom will make a basic photo taken inside of the café appear to be professionally taken for marketing.

Holiday Backgrounds That Change Everything

I take pictures of my food, then put those pictures onto Visboom and look at the holiday-themed backgrounds available to use. There are many choices of backgrounds. Some are warm fireplace-themed for coffee and other hot drinks; others are more festive table themed for cakes and pastries; snow-covered window-themed for winter products; and others are elegant Christmas dinner-themed for those higher-priced items.

Visboom's AI technology creates backgrounds that look completely realistic. It uses very sophisticated technology to study the photos of the food and seamlessly overlay them into the backgrounds. It also has the ability to adjust the lighting on the food images so that the food has the same ambient lighting from the background image, maintains realistic shadows and reflections, and has a balanced composition that makes them very appetizing.

For each of my Christmas menu items, which include a Gingerbread Latte, Peppermint Hot Chocolate, and a Holiday Cheesecake, I chose a different background based on mood and placement. The images I created make it appear as though they were professionally photographed in beautiful holiday settings, when, in fact, I took the photos at my counter in my café.

Impact on Business

Social media interaction with holiday menu posts was 180% higher than normal image posts. When people shared or saved holiday related stories and reels that included Food Photos edited using Artificial Intelligence (AI), the user engagement level was very high. The engagement level is a clear indicator that the product has value, and that the content posted via the company's social media channels resonates with users.

Sales data supports that, Holiday items featuring Visboom (after photos) made up 65% of the November - December sales, over the 40% target I anticipated. Several items sold out more quickly than I originally projected. Some of the customers even provided feedback about how they would like to visit the café based off the 'festive cozy' aesthetics of the holiday photo posts they saw on Instagram. I found it interesting that many customers asked me to take photos for them at locations that looked like what they had seen in the holiday posts on social media. There was a temporary miscommunication since the actual café did not match exactly what they had seen in the photo posts. Overall the reaction was positive however and they understood the value of creative visual presentations.

The full expenditure to use Visboom and learn their software is less than 500,000 Indonesian rupees, way less than 500,000,000 Indonesian rupees and take up to 5 hours. In comparison, the cost of hiring a professional photographer for the same amount of imagery ranges between 7 and 10 million Indonesian rupees and doesn’t yield nearly as many opportunities for tweaking results post-production.

With an AI-based solution, I have total flexibility and an unlimited number of opportunities for refining my creative output. I can simply go back and make any changes in an existing image, create additional images with different background images or colour palettes, create additional seasonal variations of the same item and do all this with no further outlay.

The use of AI tools ultimately means that you do not need to spend months developing your product in order to begin producing it, or to pay top prices for only a few samples of each product. All you need to do is produce an image of your great tasting food that has been plated appropriately and let the AI turn it into beautiful visuals so that you can produce seasonal marketing materials for holidays where the demand for high-quality marketing visuals is only going to increase.