Kyle
When I’m on the road (which is 90% of the time) eating is usually easy, I know what kind of foods I like and I like to try restaurants that I can’t get anywhere else. I also have my favorite dives and regional chains based on where I am. It’s when I get home that dinner gets tricky. “What’s for dinner” can literally be a 3 hour process in my house because no one knows what they want or wants to articulate it in any reasonable fashion. By the time the decision is made it’s typically take out from one of the same four places from the previous day.
Well a Virginia startup called FoodMeetsDrink is about to help me with that problem. We are all well aware that there are a bajillion restaurant apps. Some are great, like Venga, others are useful, like urban spoon but so far there hasn’t been a good app that combines both restaurants and cooking at home. So to date we can’t find a good app that really answers the question “What’s for dinner?” Until now.
FoodMeetsDrink answers that question as co-founder Dave Forbes tells us: We answer the question, “What’s for dinner tonight?” by providing a visual method to create any combination of distinct ingredients and locate just the right recipe, local restaurant or food source for specific ingredients.
More after the break
We got a chance to interview Dave as they put the finishing touches on their public facing product.
So Dave, Who are the founders of FoodMeetsDrink, and what are their backgrounds?
There are four of us. I am CEO and founder of Contextware, Inc, which I started back in 2001. We develop and sell knowledge management/content technologies to commercial and federal enterprises. I am also the primary inventor on a patent for our business process engine. Before that I was marketing director for a Kodak company that developed digital asset management technology. David Austin is cofounder and president of Contextware, his background is in marketing and sales strategy for Manugistics, MCI and as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Jamie Stachowski is our food expert, he is a classically trained french chef and CEO of Stachowski Brand Charcuterie, which wholesales and retails all-natural cured and fresh meats in the Mid Atlantic region. Senthil Ramiah is head of engineering, he is currently CEO of Aileron Consulting which specializes in health data technology. Senthil has architected numerous large scale web apps for clients such as Appnet and the Wedding Channel.
With all that varying experience, how did you come up with the idea for FoodMeetsDrink?
Food Meets Drink represents a collision between my passion for cooking and experimenting with my patented technology that is particularly good at the disambiguation of polysemous nouns and verbs. I was wandering thru a local farmers’ market and one of the farms had a bunch of different types of kale. I thought to myself, is kale just kale? Or does a specific variety of kale have unique and different relationships than those of another variety? That would be kind of cool to see. But then I thought, what if I could bring my iPad to the market, click on an image of kale (or easily navigate to see different kinds of kale), then see images of things that “go with” and I could click those things to keep refining and refining? And all the time I was clicking I could see a constantly changing list of recipe search results? And when I found a recipe I liked, I could tag it with a day and time, which would add items to my home inventory and create a shopping list for things I did not have — even automatically place the order online? Now that would be really, really cool.
Who is your target user?
Consumers who want to have a little fun or a little pain figuring out what to have for dinner. There will also be a strong appeal to foodies who I think will become power users – their usage will help us better understand what features are critical for success. Mobile is a must.
What is your monetization plan?
Our initial focus is localized, contextually precise advertising. So when I click on “kielbasa” I will see an ad from both local businesses and online businesses for that and nothing else. We also envision revenue from online grocer ordering; contextual, localized coupons; a buyers club of hard-to-find and interesting artisanal food items; and ultimately a premium account model where folks can configure their own food universe of likes and dislikes (diet, allergies, nutrition, etc.), with features like a home inventory, planning calendar, recipe repository, and so on.
Ok so we noticed the note on the site about everything being clickable and being overwhelmed. We’re a bit overhwelmed. Scale it down for us.
Our intent in creating Food Meets Drink was to provide visitors the ability to drill down into search results using any dimension or attribute of food. So our design goal was allow for that by providing a visual method of navigation – with more important features more prominent. At first glance there is a lot there, but it all “belongs” and in our testing we have determined there are two basic kinds of users, those who jump in and are happy to roll around in the muck, and those who are happy just selecting a couple of ingredient types and watching the results flow.
What is the problem Foodmeetsdrink is solving
Food is highly subjective. What would you like for dinner? How can I use this ingredient in my fridge? Did you like what you had for lunch or not? What about last night? Our approach helps folks figure out what they really want so they get fewer, better search results and they can more quickly make a satisfying decision.
What is your secret sauce?
Food Meets Drink leverages three primary technologies — a patented business process engine we use to manage interconnected taxonomies and workflow, a semantic engine that uses the web as corpus to crowd source discovery of meaningful data patterns, and an expert user interface platform that enables data navigation and manipulation for decision support. Bottom line, a whole lot of things are going on behind the scenes to make sure you “discover” just the right recipe or restaurant.
are you bootstrapping it or funded?
Bootstrapping…for now
What’s next for foodmeetsdrink?
Well, we just put out a release with a bunch of new features including a source directory where local and national producers can create free and paid listings, so we want to focus on getting that populated, we think it will be a killer service to help drive traffic. We are also working on a Facebook app and an iPad app, and planning the next stage of development for user accounts.
Linkage:
Find out and try out FoodMeetsDrink here
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