In contemporary society, the application of artificial intelligence for automatic food recognition offers substantial potential for nutrition tracking, reducing food waste, and enhancing productivity in food production and consumption scenarios. Cutting-edge technologies such as Computer Vision and Deep Learning are highly beneficial, enabling machines to learn automatically, thereby facilitating automatic visual recognition. Despite some research in this field, the challenge of achieving accurate automatic food recognition quickly remains a significant research gap. Some models have been developed and implemented, but maintaining high performance swiftly, with low computational cost and low access to expensive hardware accelerators, is still an area that needs further exploration and improvement. This study employs the pre-trained MobileNetV2 model, which is cost-efficient and fast, for automatic food recognition on the public Food11 dataset, comprising 16643 images. It also utilizes various tools and techniques such as dataset understanding, transfer learning, data augmentation, regularization, dynamic learning rate, hyperparameter tuning, and consideration of images in different sizes to cut time and enhance the model’s performance and robustness. These techniques aid in choosing appropriate metrics, achieving better performance, avoiding overfitting and accuracy fluctuations, speeding up the model, and increasing the generalization of findings, making the study and its results applicable to real-world applications. Despite MobileNetV2′s simpler structure and fewer trainable parameters compared to some deep-dense models in the deep learning area, it quickly achieved approximately 92.97 % accuracy. This underscores the model’s potential for implementation in real-world applications, which is the main intention of this study.