The Menu Said ‘Breakfast Soda.’ The AI Served Bacon and Eggs Floating in a Pint of Cola. Just Eat Has Apologised and Paused the Trial.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to Northern Ireland, to a cafe that sells soda bread breakfasts — the popular Irish breakfast sandwiches, built on soda bread, the way breakfast has worked there for a very long time. The cafe had not photographed its own food, and Just Eat had a solution for that, as The Independent reported on October 20: the delivery app had been using AI to generate images for restaurants that hadn’t taken their own photographs, tagging each photo on the menu as “AI-generated” when it had used the tool. Feed the machine the menu text, get a picture back. Simple. Except the machine read the words “Breakfast Soda” and did what machines do when nobody who has ever eaten breakfast is supervising: it took them literally. The picture customers were shown, credited to JustEatUK and shared by The Independent and The Grocer, is a pint glass of dark fizzy drink with sausages and bacon submerged in it and a fried egg floating on top. A breakfast, in a soda. One customer, quoted by The Grocer, looked at that pint and delivered the review the whole trial will be remembered by: “the actual worst thing I’ve ever seen.” That is not a rendering error on the margins. That is a delivery giant publishing, on a real menu customers order from, a glass of cola with meat in it — and calling it food photography.

It was not one bad pint

If the pint had been alone, this would be a funny screenshot and a quiet fix. It was not alone, and that is the story. According to The Independent, the spree went well beyond one cafe. The Independent catalogued it in full. Salt and pepper chips — a delicacy found in many Chinese takeaways, normally fried onions, chilli and peppers — was rendered as blandly seasoned potato snacks for a number of caterers, a picture so wrong that one X user reshared it with the warning, quoted by The Independent: “I swear if my salt and pepper chips come like this I’m going to cause murder.” The option of cheddar cheese in the vegetarian section of one cafe’s menu was turned into an orange fondue-like sauce. According to The Grocer, the trial produced its own gallery of exhibits: an aeroplane made from bread on a plate, generated from the prompt “Garlic Bread Plane”; a miniature burger sitting in a small sauce pot, generated from a listing for burger sauce; sushi rolls with cheese fillings for a listing for “Cheese Roll”; and chunks of watermelon floating in a glass of wine, because a sauvignon blanc listing had mentioned the fruit in its flavour notes. Read that list again slowly. The tool was not misreading obscure dishes. It was failing at chips, cheese, bread and sauce — the four corners of the takeaway universe — and every failure was published, labelled and left in front of paying customers until the customers themselves did the quality control in public.

Ireland got the deluxe edition

According to The Journal, reporting on Irish menus the same day, there was a second wave that deserves its own paragraph, because it shows the same disease in a different accent. A batter burger — a beef burger in batter, an Irish chip-shop staple — was depicted as a beef burger between what looked like two battered buns, as if the batter were the bread. A smoked cod listing, with “wheat flour” written beneath it, featured a fish fillet topped with what appeared to be loose flour, served like seasoning. Scampi, a popular deep-fried fish option, was displayed as sushi. And on another menu, where the description of a doner kebab had included the ingredients for its flatbread, the AI deconstructed those ingredients onto a plate and did not show a kebab at all. The Journal added two details that turn a comedy story into an accountability story. The first: Just Eat said every AI image is manually checked by a person — and, as The Journal put it, somehow the flour-covered fish survived that process. The second: despite running its own AI trial, Just Eat does not allow restaurants to use their own AI-generated images, telling The Journal it wanted to ensure images were accurate and realistic and to keep use of the technology tightly controlled. Controlled. The pint of meat cola was the controlled version. Restaurants could opt out and upload their own photographs at any time, The Journal reported — which raises the obvious question of why the giant with the photographers needed the machine in the first place.

The apology, in its own words

Because here is the part that removes every excuse, and it comes from Just Eat itself. In its statement on October 20, according to The Independent, according to The Grocer and according to The Journal, a Just Eat spokesperson said: “We want partners on our platform to show photos that accurately reflect their dishes so that our customers can be confident in what they are ordering and happy when their food arrives. We work with tens of thousands of small restaurants on their food imagery, including funding professional local photographers. We’ve been trialling AI-enhanced images and as with any new technology, it isn’t always quite right the first time. We’re sorry for any inaccurate images that have been posted. We’re in the process of removing them and have paused rolling this out while we further develop the tool to ensure it best serves our partners and customers.” Sit with the middle of that statement. Just Eat funds professional local photographers. The accurate version of this service already existed, inside the same company, paid for by the same company. The trial was not filling a gap nobody could fill; it was a shortcut taken by a business that already employed the humans who do the job properly. And “isn’t always quite right the first time” is doing heroic work in that sentence: a fried egg floating in cola is not a first draft with rough edges, it is a picture no person who had looked at it for three seconds would have approved — which circles back to The Journal’s manual-check detail and asks how many eyes these images actually passed.

According to TechRadar, which reported the same trial on October 20, the bacon-and-egg cola exposed a much bigger problem with AI-generated food imagery — a machine asked to picture food it has never seen will invent the food instead. The menus in this story are that problem, published.

Now be clear about who the injured parties are, because the roast has an address and it is not the cafes. The small restaurants and takeaways on those menus did nothing wrong. They trusted the platform that takes its cut of their orders to present their food honestly, and the platform presented a soda-bread bap as a meat pint, their scampi as sushi and their cod under a dusting of raw flour. According to The Independent, the tool sometimes got it right — it correctly imagined full English breakfasts and generic curries — which almost makes it worse: a system reliable enough to trust and wrong enough, often enough, to make a customer wonder what will actually arrive in the bag. Food ordering runs on one promise, that the picture is the plate. Break that promise at scale, with a label as the only defence, and the apology has to be as big as the rollout was. To Just Eat’s credit, the end came fast once the pictures went public: apology issued, images being removed, rollout paused, all on the same day, October 20. But the pause is the confession. You do not pause a trial that is working.

So total the evening. A delivery giant fed its partners’ menus to a machine that cannot tell a soda bap from a soda, published the results on real menus, let a meat-filled pint stand as a cafe’s breakfast, and discovered the problem at the speed of social media — from its own customers. The technology will, as the statement says, be further developed. Fine. Develop it in a lab, on test menus, in front of people paid to catch a floating egg. Not on a small cafe in Northern Ireland that just wanted a photograph of its breakfast. The tape here is a pint glass, and everything in it is wrong.

THE VERDICT — After review: Just Eat is outta pocket.