Abstract: People are becoming increasingly concerned about their diet, whether for disease prevention, medical treatment or other purposes. In meals served in restaurants, schools or public canteens, it is not easy to identify the ingredients and/or the nutritional information they contain. Currently, technological solutions based on deep learning models have facilitated the recording and tracking of food consumed based on the recognition of the main dish present in an image. Considering that sometimes there may be multiple foods served on the same plate, food analysis should be treated as a multi-class object detection problem. EfficientDet and YOLOv5 are object detection algorithms that have demonstrated high mAP and real-time performance on general domain data. However, these models have not been evaluated and compared on public food datasets. Unlike general domain objects, foods have more challenging features inherent in their nature that increase the complexity of detection. In this work, we performed a performance evaluation of Efficient-Det and YOLOv5 on three public food datasets: UNIMIB2016, UECFood256 and ChileanFood64. From the results obtained, it can be seen that YOLOv5 provides a significant difference in terms of both mAP and response time compared to EfficientDet in all datasets. Furthermore, YOLOv5 outperforms the state-of-the-art on UECFood256, achieving an improvement of more than 4% in terms of mAP@.50 over the best reported.