With the recent announcement of Mistral OCR, an old idea of using code to extract my son’s school menu has been revived.

The menu looks like this:

The goal is to extract the starter, main course, dessert, and snack for each day.

Manually extracting this information can be challenging because the document is designed to be visually appealing for humans, not machines. However, with Mistral’s new API, this task can now be accomplished with just a few lines of code.

Initializing the Model

from mistralai import Mistral
import os

api_key = os.environ["MISTRAL_API_KEY"]
client = Mistral(api_key=api_key)
model = "mistral-small-latest"

I chose the mistral-small-latest model because it has vision capabilities.

Defining the Messages

Next, we need to prompt the model with what we want and provide the image as input.

messages = [
    {
        "role": "system",
        "content": "Extract the list of menus for each day of the week"
    },
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image_url",
                "image_url": "https://www.kremlinbicetre.fr/app/uploads/2025/02/Capture-decran-2025-02-12-a-13.54.09.png"
            }
        ]
    }
]

Structuring the Output

To structure the output, we’ll use Pydantic, a Python library for defining data models.

from typing import List
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Menu(BaseModel):
    day: int
    month: int
    starter: str
    main: str
    dessert: str
    snack: str

class Menus(BaseModel):
    menus: List[Menu]

Calling the Model

Now, we can call the model and ask it to parse the output as a list of menus.

chat_response = client.chat.parse(
    model=model,
    messages=messages,
    response_format=Menus,
    temperature=0
)

The Result

Finally, we can iterate over the result and print the menu for each day.

for menu in chat_response.choices[0].message.parsed.menus:
    print(f"{menu.day:02d}/{menu.month:02d}")
    print(f"* Starter: {menu.starter}\n* Main: {menu.main}\n* Dessert: {menu.dessert}\n* Snack: {menu.snack}")

I did an export to an ICS and imported into Google Calendar:

It’s impressive that I was able to achieve this with just a few lines of code while few years ago I would have been struggling to do the same task.