AI Restaurant Menu Parser — Photos → Dishes, Prices & Allergens

Upload menu photos (or send URLs/base64 through JSON), get back the menu as structured JSON — one record per dish. Richer than generic menu-OCR actors:

• name (translated to your language) + originalName (as printed)
• category, price (with currency, as shown)
• ingredients — atomic base ingredients (composite preparations like pesto or hummus are decomposed), each with an English database name, translated display name, and EU-14 allergens with confidence levels
• dietaryType — Vegan / Vegetarian / Pescetarian / Other, with explanation
• nutritionInfo — estimated serving size, calories, protein, fat, carbs
• story — origin story / cultural significance
• isAlcoholic for beverages

15 output languages. The prompt is the production pipeline of a dietary-restrictions travel app — battle-tested on real menus worldwide.

Bring your own Gemini key

Parsing runs on your Google AI Studio key (get one free) — you control the AI cost and quota. A typical menu runs a few cents on Gemini 2.5 Flash, or a fraction of that on Flash-Lite.

Apify charges $0.005 after a non-empty dataset is pushed, plus $0.002 per dish. Your first live run waives up to 10 per-dish charges; the $0.005 start charge still applies. Empty and failed parses produce a diagnostic: true row with a message and create no Apify billing events, although Gemini may still charge your account for an attempted inference.

Input example

{
  "imageUrls": ["https://example.com/menu-page-1.jpg", "https://example.com/menu-page-2.jpg"],
  "geminiApiKey": "AIza…",
  "language": "en"
}

Notes

• The untouched keyless Console run returns one deterministic row labelled recordType: "DEMO" / isDemo: true. It makes no image or Gemini call and is not billed. Customize the input and add your Gemini key to use the normal live path.
• The Console accepts local JPEG, PNG, or WebP uploads directly. API callers may use HTTP(S) URLs, base64 data URIs, or raw base64 in imageUrls.
• Each decoded image is limited to 10 MiB. Inline payloads and signed URL credentials are replaced with safe references in output records and logs.
• First live run allowance: up to 10 per-dish charges are waived; the actor-start charge still applies. The untouched prefilled DEMO is separate and completely free.
• Up to 20 images per run, parsed together as one menu.
• Unreadable items are skipped rather than guessed; empty results produce a non-billed diagnostic row explaining why.
• Don't have menu photos yet? The companion Google Maps Menu Scraper actor finds them from a Google Maps place URL and parses them in one run.

Safety

Allergen, dietary, ingredient and nutrition fields are AI-generated estimates. They can be wrong and do not account reliably for substitutions or kitchen cross-contact. Verify critical information with the restaurant; do not rely on this output as medical advice or as the sole safeguard for a severe allergy.

Support & links

• Questions, bug reports and FAQ: github.com/Exdenta/traveleat-support
• This actor runs the same menu pipeline as Travel Eat — scan a menu, get allergens, ingredients and dietary filters in 36 languages.