TOPIC #5 VAC: AI based Restaurant App Concept & The Food Buddy You Need

Personalization, it is one of the most demanding feature in the current scenario considering deep Big Data, Machine learning, and  AI.

Big companies like Google, Facebook,  Amazon, Netflix and even dating apps like Tinder, are continuously improving their service in providing a personalized experience to the customers by understanding their users with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

It has become an essential aspect because of countless options available to choose today, so after studying the big picture, we are addressing the smaller but very annoying problem of choosing local restaurant or place to eat or with our AI based Restaurant App Concept .

“Apps for finding restaurants are plentiful, but most of them leave me feeling overwhelmed. I want someone to choose for me.” – Joshua Brustein, The New York Times

Eating out made simple with AI based Restaurant App Concept

Throughout the day, we as an individual get confronted with so many choice, making a quick, apt decision takes longer than it should.  And on top of this, what to eat when you feel like eating from outside is a question one definitely dreads facing.

The app industry is booming with features and services that can make your life better, smoother and act as a catalyst to most of your daily chores.

Everyday tech enthusiasts come up with ideas to launch a new application; dreaming every bit that it becomes a huge success or serves the purpose correctly for what it is intended.  

This corresponds to thousands of apps being added everyday to the application market. 

The Food & Beverage Industry

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Here is something worth mentioning- A vast majority of mobile searches made on mobile devices were to access information about the food and beverage industry.

Food & Beverage industry tops the list with 72 percent of online searches on mobile devices.

A survey by digital savings giant, RetailMeNot, shows-  of all the diners survey, one in four had at least one restaurant-specific application on their smartphone. Which means 25 percent of people have at least one restaurant app.

13 percent of respondents said they come to know about restaurants through food and dining apps such as Yelp and OpenTable.

53 percent of the people surveyed, used their phone to find a restaurant location, 

49 percent had done so to browse a restaurant’s menu. Additionally,

35 percent of those individuals had used their phone to place an order for pick-up or delivery,

and 25 percent had made a dining reservation with their phone.

Now, if we take a closer look, all these businesses are closely related on a micro-level.

The online travel reservation services, hotel bookings, food etc, each of these businesses are an important part of a larger ecosystem.

They are closely entwined together on a very deeper level. Effect on one business affects the other directly.

A locality which sees a spike in inbound tourism will directly experience a boost in the local hotel bookings and hospitality.

With more number of people staying in the locality, the food and beverage consumption will also increase.

Hotels and restaurants will see a major increase in the number of new guests visiting their premises.

Entrepreneurs will start seeing potential in the market and will invest their money to open new restaurants, local eateries etc.  A classic example of demand and supply.

Now, the catch with demand and supply is, they both can never reach the perfect equilibrium; a stage where both are perfectly equal and none of them increases or decreases.  

They always fluctuate. And with the case of supply, there is always room for improvement, improvisation, betterment, and going above the expectations.

When local eateries, restaurants etc increase in a given locality, food based applications and websites enter to give them a boost.

These apps help bring more audience to the business. Be it food delivery, online ordering, table-bookings, review and recommendations, restaurant finder, check-ins, coupons and deals, food recommendations,  saved places etc today there are tons of applications that serve different purposes.

What is so special about this app?

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If someone wants to eat outside, they can simply open their app, search for all the available restaurants, choose the restaurant they like and visit the place or they can order the food online to get it delivered.

If they want to book a table to for particular time-slot, there are applications that allow booking a table online.

Now, if someone wants to know about the trending new restaurant in the town, they have applications where people recommend certain eateries, provide reviews and feedback. Eating out or ordering online has become faster than ever.

These applications work like a breeze to assist you in your food based chores.  

However, there is something very basic, very trivial that these applications have not been able to address.

All these applications work best when you know what exactly do you want to eat. After speculating and debating for dozens of minutes, people look up to these apps to find an eatery that serves their purpose.

What about when you don’t know what is it that you should eat? What is it that you crave or have not tried since the last time you thought about it?

What if an application aides you in deciding what you would want to eat? or more specifically what if an application tells you exactly what you should eat?

This brings us to the Virgin App Concept– we fondly call VAC.

Today, we will discuss about our AI based restaurant app concept it is not just app but more of a food buddy than an app.

A concept that packs the power of all the applications into one.

How did we came up with the Idea?

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Every weekend when I wanted to eat out, I would be confronted with one big question- What should I eat? And I loathed facing it.

Even after knowing there are tons of different cuisines available out there, this dilemma of what to eat when outside just bothers me.

Someday I would open Yelp and find the trending restaurants near me.

I would see people check-in to some of my favorite places, write great reviews about others.  

The other day I opened OpenTable to get a table pre-booked for a Saturday night dinner with my wife. But, it was preceded by a long discussion about what to eat and where to go; where I wanted to have Italian, she insisted on having Indian- We settled for newly opened Thai food restaurant!

The next weekend when my friends and I gathered to sit and relax at a fun place, I checked SALT in order to see where to eat or drink. I had saved the name of the restaurant I wanted to visit but to my dismay, it was closed for the coming 2 weeks.

I want an app that tells me what I should eat, where I will find it, shows me only those places which are open currently, allows me to book a table (can be a secondary factor), shows reviews and completes the entire journey of ‘eating from outside’.

What is the point in displaying unnecessary restaurant information when it is either closed for a particular time slot, does not take an online reservation or is not accepting online orders.

Let’s say, for example, I want to order breakfast online today. When I open my favorite food application, it displays the name of all the restaurants in my locality. And down at the bottom of each restaurant tab, I can see

‘Opens at 7 p.m.” or 

‘Does not accept online orders before 11 a.m.’ or

‘Closed for online ordering.’

Who would want such response right from the time they get up?!

This is when we brainstormed about the obstacles and came up with a AI based restaurant app which understands my preferences, understand the time and situation and only display the best options for me at that point of time, like how any of my foodie friend will give me suggestion.

Features and Technological Requirements of an AI based Restaurant App – The Perfect Recipe

What we think a AI based Restaurant app be like:

• An AI based Restaurant app  will be able to sense the time and phase of the day in order to better provide recommendations. When someone wakes-up in the morning and checks the application, it should sense the time of the day and display only those restaurants which 1) are open at the current moment 2) Accept online ordering or are taking orders for take-away or dine-in 3) Serves breakfast at this hour. These should be the basic algorithm set inside the app.
• An AI-based restaurant app will be able to decide if the user is looking for breakfast, brunch, lunch, evening snack or dinner. With the inbuilt time tracker and information fed into the app, it will be able to deduce what exactly is the user looking for. This will enable better display of results. Those restaurants which do not qualify for certain criteria will not be displayed in the initial results. If a user opens the application between 12 pm and 3 pm, it should only display those restaurants which are open between these time slots.
• Every time a user visits a particular restaurant, she will either write a review, rate the restaurant and the food on different parameters. The application will save all of this information intact. This info will then be stored in their profile under the ‘Top Favorites’ tab. No need for the user to mark a particular restaurant as a favorite by themselves. Based on the reviews and stars they provide to rate the restaurant, the app AI engine will understand which places in particular the user likes the most.
• Whenever a user visits a particular restaurant, the app will come to know about the primary cuisine that the restaurant serves. The affiliation with various restaurant’s online portal, allows the app to understand what cuisine the user had during the last visit. This data is also stored in the user’s profile which says, ‘Cuisines Tried’.  This can be easily fed into the application data structure with the help of the various tags the restaurants are categorized under viz Mexican, Italian, Seafood etc.
• In continuation with the above point, let’s say a user checks his mobile at around 7 pm for dinner recommendations. With the said algorithm, the app will be able to deduce that the user is looking for dinner. This will isolate all those restaurants which are not open at this time of the hour out from the search results. The comes a pop-up that asks the users, ‘Last time you tried Mexican at Nopalito. Do you want to try the same cuisine?” followed by a simple Yes or No option. As soon as the user selects ‘No’, the application then removes ‘Mexican’ cuisine out of the question and what follows is the series of other recommendation except Mexican.

With the inbuilt function to capture the time from the device, this app will also be able to fetch the exact date. App structure will have various months assigned to various foods. Or to be more specific,  our AI based restaurant app will be able to know the current season from the month that is ongoing.

This will further enhance the food recommendation experience of the app. If someone picks up the device at 9 pm on 10th December 2018, the application will show all those eateries

1) which are open till late night

2) which are warm and cozy (learning from user reviews)

3) which have great soups, eggs, cheese, fish,  and chicken.

It will display the results with a statement that tells the users that these are the best foods to have in winter. Serving a more intimate user experience.

USP of Our AI based Restaurant App

Along with all these features built into the application, we intend to allow users to perform all those regular activities which other applications are serving.

Booking a table, ordering online, ordering for a takeaway, reviewing and recommendation, social activities like check-ins and uploading pictures, searching for the nearest restaurant based on location, order tracking, Google maps integration to pinpoint the exact location, saving places for later visit, a new restaurant in town notification etc.

Our AI based restaurant app concept is developed to serve the purpose of online based food industry right from the A to Z. The functioning of all the apps packed into one.

For Users:

They can easily decide what they want to eat or what they should eat without having to face much hassle.

Instead of leaving the decision to an online fortune wheel, which randomly picks a cuisine, leaving you unsatisfied and tired after stumbling upon each cuisine mentioned on the wheel, you are back to square one, this AI based restaurant app model absorbs, understands, processes and provides valuable suggestion which you can rely on.

Application’s AI engine knows what time of the year it is, what phase of the day it is, which restaurants are open and which aren’t, what are your top favorite restaurants and most liked cuisines, and what food you had previously to provide astonishingly bespoke food recommendations.

For Businesses:

Restaurant owners will tie up with the app. Their information, including but not limited to restaurant timings or working hours, location, peak hours, online availability, discounts and offers etc will be displayed on the app.

The restaurant recommendations will be displayed to the users in order of relevance, ratings, sponsorship etc.

As with machine learning this AI based restaurant app displays results that are tailor-made for different users, those restaurants which serve a wide variety of purposes for the users will benefit.

If a restaurant serves grilled chicken and fish, they will be displayed on the top of the results during a search in winter.

This idea makes for a great partnership between the application and the restaurants, giving a mutual boost to each other.

As we will discuss in depth further, this app is the belief that the system will suggest the best possible ideas to its users because it has been carefully crafted to observe, capture, store, analyze, review, and share flawless results to its users.

Curious about revenue generation strategies  for the restaurant booking app here are 8 Ideal revenue strategy for Restaurant Booking App 

Target Audience Segmentation For the Application

Geographically

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The fundamental concept behind the AI based restaurant app concept  is to pinpoint the target audience based on their geographic location.

As discussed at the very start, a place where there are number of restaurants, which is densely populated, has good per capita income, where are there are major number of reputed institutions, colleges, universities etc can be considered an ideal place to launch the application.

Let’s have a look how this looks in the real world. We spin the globe and stop and Beijing: A city with a total population of 2.7 million as of 2016. Beijing ranks No. 1 in terms of most number of hotels in a city.  

Talking in terms of restaurants, Amsterdam has the most number of restaurants per 100.000 population. The total population of Amsterdam is estimated to be 845,000.

Cafés and bars: 1,515

Clubs: 16

Restaurants: 1,325

Taking into consideration these figures, it makes Amsterdam one of the most ideal places for our application.

Furthermore, there are cities like Paris, Dubai, Mumbai etc which are gold mines for the business of this app. They check all the boxes on our list of geographic research and serve a huge potential.

Talking about the United States, according to the report by The National Restaurant Association (NRA) California has by far the most restaurants with a staggering 87,225 dining establishments. New York State comes in at a meager 58,027.

These are some of the basic prerequisites to take into consideration.

Psychographically

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In order to strengthen the base where the application will stand, a thorough market research and analysis should be done.

In order to get the hold of the existing lifestyle of users in the targeted area, a research should be conducted to deduce the best possible outcome.

This involves dividing users according to different personality traits, values, interests, and lifestyle; known as psychographic segmentation.

This helps in identifying people based on the way they think and the kind of life they want to have or aspire.

Psychographic segmentation for our AI based restaurant app can be divided into the following aspects:

LifeStyle Based:

Based on the lifestyle of people, we get the data on how often do the people of a particular city prefer eating out. How often do they order food online? Are these college students, working teens. Adults etc.

Once we get the results based on surveys, insights etc, we can plan out a targeted marketing strategy.

Personality based:

Another important variable of this segmentation is based on personality. This is knowing what personality does the user exhibit, do the individuals have a rich taste in terms of food & beverages.

A person who loves to dine out at expensive restaurants and clubs or someone who prefers hanging out at affordable budget diners every weekend with their social group forms a major chunk of our targeted audience for this app.

Social Based:

In a society, each individual has varied purchasing powers.

This puts every individual in a different social class. The social class of a person is determined by how much a person earns and what are his or her spending habits.

This showcases how socially liberal or conservative an individual is. People would often eat out more often than required in order to be socially acceptable.

Demographically

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This is one of the most deciding factors when measuring success of any business. Any business which does not take the demographics into consideration might get flawed down the lane.

Each individual age group behaves differently, each age group shares a unique relationship with the business or in this case, the applications.

User interaction time, the number of daily opens per day, profile depth app friendly-ness of the user etc have to be taken into consideration during the design process. Hence, targeting the correct user-base is of utmost importance for our AI based restaurant app.

For this app, the correct user-base falls between the ages 15-55. Every individual, today, falling between these age groups have a good, thorough knowledge of how apps work.

They understand the requirements for the app to function correctly and carry the patience to interact with the app on a daily basis.

A more magnified age group will be 21-35. People under this age group are hard earning millennials who interact with their smartphones more than any other age group.  

They have, what we call, the app-dexterity, to understand and grasp the working of the application much faster.

These youths also spend more time searching for apps, have a good social media presence, and love trying out new things.

The below graph shows, the total share of consumers who used food delivery services in the United States in 2016.

Understanding such demographics will help connect with the correct audience, at the correct time, at the correct place.

Product Life Cycle Of a AI based Restaurant App

Every product, regardless of its overall success, has a life-cycle of its own. Each product is mortal and can decline over time.

This aspect of product life cycle is not to be taken negatively. A positive outlook helps develop a notion to mitigate on the arising hurdles and coming up with great solutions that stay inside customer’s hearts for the time to come.  

Most of the revenue for a business is generated between these stages, from its birth to its decline stage.

Introduction Stage

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Once this application is launched in the market, it is sure to create a buzz among the users. Concept of an AI based Restaurant app has never been introduced before in any of the existing food based application.

When users will start getting desired recommendations from the applications, more and more people will learn about it through, word of mouth, online articles, reviews and shares, social media etc. Today, it doesn’t take much time for a new concept to go viral.

With the application getting the required attention, people will surely start to notice potential in this concept. The big-players might start to understand the working principles of the app and start integrating it in their app.

This could be a potential competition for our app in the adolescent stage.

Even new players might try copying similar concept and introduce fresh competition in the market. Usually it takes 2-3 years for an idea to catch hold of the competitors.

Growth Stage

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This is where most of the work is required during the entire life cycle. To stay ahead of the arising competition, possible backlash (this is completely unavoidable), negative reviews (again, unavoidable), user feedbacks, suggestions etc constant improvements, bug fixes, new updates have to be pushed through the app.

Probably, after  3-6 years, an application requires maximum effort to sustain in the market. This is because of the above-stated factors affecting the application’s growth. With the increase in demand for better features and increased competition, an application needs constant work to stay ahead of the curve.

During this phase, the AI based restaurant app concept will no more be a concept and your business will no more consider as a startup, So, now the working knowledge of application, opens up new doors to new markets. Targeting new markets geographically and expand the reach will be on top if the list. This adds more restaurants, eateries, bars, cafes, diners to our list. New partnerships developed with the help of huge success in other regions, helps generate more revenue from the app.

Maturity Stage

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Maturity stage for a company usually come after 8-10 years of market success. Do not confuse this stage with saturation.

Maturity stage is when a business is almost self-sustaining. When your business has reached a level where revenues are now autonomous, you do not need to put in more efforts in the current working principles.

However, in order to expand more a business will need to take external help. Maturity is a two way stage. The working of the business and the amount of revenue generated are more or less equal.

This is where the management decides if going public would be more beneficial or not.

Going public may benefit for the app, if the future services the app will provide will be lauded and appreciated by the consumers. In comes the research and development. An industry where innovation is the key, an R&D department becomes inevitable.

No one knows what future technology will bring for us, hence hiring a bunch of smart-heads who research on the current technology and develop ground breaking solutions inside of the app will largely benefit the business.

SWOT Analysis

This brings to the end of the journey with our Concept of AI based restaurant app. A SWOT analysis has been the most tried and tested method in business analytics so far. It has stood against the test of time, firmly.

Let’s have a look at how our app fairs out in this analysis.

The SWOT analysis can be grouped into two equal parts.

SWOT:- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

The Bright Side

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Our bright side includes two aspects of SWOT analysis. Its strengths and the opportunities.

Strengths

When we look at a larger picture, a business’s actual strength lies in its customers. The greater number of loyal customers a business has, the stronger it stands against its competitors.

Today, the biggest strength of Apple inc. is its customers; an astronomical amount of fan following it has managed to create all over the world. And how did it manage to do that? That exactly is the first point in SWOT analysis.

Apple gave the audience a product around which they created a style-symbol.

They marketed their products as something which is “worth” owning. An idea was seeded into the minds of consumers that having an Apple product was nothing less than a status-quo. They believed in their product.

They believed because they knew no one else was making devices as they were. Their strength was their belief in their product, a belief that was born out of confidence.

This AI based Restaurant app has not been tried before. The concept or idea have not been executed, at the time of writing this.

An application which acts more as a personal friend when it comes to suggesting where to eat when to eat, and what to eat at this precise time of the day, has not been built yet.

The biggest strength of this app is the belief that the system will suggest the best possible ideas to its users because it has been carefully crafted to observe, capture, store, analyze, review, and share flawless results to its users.

Users know their food suggestion is authentic and worth their time and effort, when the application has observed their eating habits, captured the data when they visited a particular restaurant and enjoyed a particular cuisine, stored the entire data along the way for when the user searches the app for the next time, analysed what is the best suggestion for its user based on all the previous data along with the date and time of the real world; all processed under an impeccable algorithm, reviewed the results before displaying it to the user and shared the final outcome or the suggestion that popped up through the intricate web of intelligent codes.

The strength of this product sits inside the core idea of the application. And, if this idea is taken care of for the coming years, customers will start believing in it too.

Opportunities

Every place that has a substantial amount of population with internet connectivity, large number of hotels, restaurants, eateries, cafes etc is a potential opportunity for the app to sustain and thrive.

The biggest opportunity can be found in the places where other online food based apps have seen their share of success.

If people there use these apps on a regular basis, there is a good chance that more than 50% of people have faced the question of what to eat? And no matter, those apps have helped them figure out places where they can dine or order from, none of those apps might have helped them figure out what to eat? and why exactly they should eat that?

This is opportunity knocking at the door, inviting to leave an impact on people’s lives.

The Grey Side

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The grey side is something which can be called the other side of one coin. Every business has its Achilles’ heel. And knowing what could potentially harm or threaten the business is always a good practice.

Weaknesses

If a project or an idea is potentially grand or has huge outcomes at stake, it requires a lot of work from both, the company and its customers as well.

A state-of-the-art car with a colossal engine took the blood and sweat out from its manufacturer.

When the buyer owns it, he has to take an equal amount of care, do regular maintenance and keep a tab on its complexities.

Similarly, when an individual starts using this AI based restaurant app, he will have to set a tad bit more amount of preferences, enter the data for visited places manually, answer some of the questions that this app poses etc in order for the app to function better.

With time, the algorithms and codes need to more compact and smart enough to process maximum data with minimal input from external factors.

Today, without setting up a bunch or preferences or answering a few questions, it is almost impossible for the app to figure out the correct results.

Its users will have to adapt with this system initially. This could be one pain point where more work will be needed.

Threats

Everyone experiences a hiccup when an outsider sets its foot in their territory.

Those already established food industry app companies will definitely groan under their teeth. Competition is more fierce than ever and calling it cut throat will be an understatement.

A major threat could be some well-established application inculcating the same feature in their app.

They might already have a large customer base and this could leave us with less number of new customers.

However, this problem can be tackled with a strong go-to marketing strategy.

Another threat could be the users themselves. If a users download the app but do not interact with the app as often as they should, it could freeze the revenue model.

This threat can be tackled through with

1) great User experience and interface of the app

2) enchanting design

3) providing discounts, coupons or offers through the app

4) keeping the users engaged with social gratification and closed peer groups.

Over to you

“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”

― Reid Hoffman

Taking risks, diving into the unknown, treading uncharted waters are the qualities that forges an entrepreneur.

They say, ‘Ideas are bulletproof.’  This is an idea conceptualized, brainstormed and formulated between closed doors and four walls.

An idea that was born out of discomfort to solve the purpose once and for all. And now it is here; on your screen, in your mind.

Probably reading the entire article might have triggered a neuron or two in between a few paras.

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