prodissues

Make Food Fun Again

Sun 20 March 2016 by yaniv

So this idea that I had. I was talking with a company that is doing personalization for jobs - UpScored. I knew Elise, their CEO, from twitter and gave their newly launched product a spin. I came back with some feedback, and after a good chat with Elise, I realized that the problem I'm working on my day-to-day - personalization engine for content, is relevant for other fields as well.

A day later, I was introduced to on of the co-founders of Plated - a meal planning service. He's story, of how they've started the company, reminded me a lot of how and why I've started FeedMe - a marketplace for food company that I started about 5 years ago and close about a year later. He was talking about Plated as a food-tech company, while I was struggling what technology had to do with the service, other than having a consumer facing website.

Anyway, at that point I was doing one plus one in my head, and the idea to develop a true technological approach to food discovery popped up. I want to develop an app that will tell me what I want to eat. Let me offer some context, though.

While food related technologies and services proliferate, the simple question of "what to eat?" becomes harder than ever.

Here's an example: last weekend I went to Austin, for the SXSW festival. I landed on Friday morning, and headed downtown for breakfast. I opened Yelp, to "discover" what I should be eating. But after looking into the first 5 results (out of hundreds), I became hungrier and less patient, so I picked up the first restaurant that I saw across the street, and which seemed decent. Yelp didn't help me to "discover" the best of Austin.

Another example: Every night (no exaggerations), I have the same dialog with my wife:

Screen_Shot_2016-03-20_at_00.03.51.png

So the problem is that not being able to choose what to eat takes the fun out of the food experience. I want an app, or a service that will take the decision for me, based on my history, my taste, my diet and that's of my partner for the order.

I spent the previous week researching, brainstorming with friends, wire-framing and what not, and got a long way in defining the problem and focusing the approach for the solution. More on it in following posts.