Oooh or Ewww… You only get one chance at a first impression  

Looks count…

How many times have you looked up a new restaurant only to be so turned off by the pictures of their food that you say to yourself, “eww, that looks nasty, I’ll never eat there”? For my wife and I, it happens far more often than it should. Just two weeks ago we wanted to take her family to a new restaurant and my Sister In-Law looked at their website and said she didn’t want to eat there because the food didn’t look very good.

The flip side of that is when we see food that looks so good, we can’t wait to go there. We’ve actually driven from San Diego to Las Vegas just to get pastries because we saw them on TV and they looked so good that we had to try them. They were totally worth it too! The same can be said of when we flew from St. Louis to Chicago just to eat at Lou Malnati’s Pizza after seeing them on the Food Network. WORTH IT!

We eat with our eyes first…

I know that being a food photographer may make me a bit biased about seeing unappetizing photos of food but I’m also someone who likes to eat and as they say, “We eat with our eyes first”. Just recently I saw photos of a French Dip Sandwich on a restaurants website and the meat was actually blue. I don’t know what type of light they had it under or what type of cell phone camera they took it with, but it should never, ever have been put on their website or even been seen by anyone.

If this is happening to your restaurant, it’s happening more than you are aware of, and it’s slowly killing your business. That is why it is so important to take a hard look at what your potential customers are seeing and ask yourself, Oooh or Ewww?