[0420] All about FOOD…Highlights from ProductHuntTO
As a foodie, I was happy to joined the productHuntTO tonight in Toronto introducing a bunch of cool products related to food. This event was awesome not only because of the food, but also all the insights and visions presenters shared.
Keynote from Ray Reddy, Founder & CEO of Ritual
Ritual is an mobile app for food order, pay and pick up. Ray shared his story on how the idea of Ritual came into being, why targeted on quick food market, as well as some product decisions they made.
1/Designing for frequency
With the extremely fierce competition for mobile apps, most downloaded apps ended up being uninstalled to free out the space of the phone. It is hard to take up a place at the HOME screen for an app and only those being used frequently will survive. This is also one of the reasons that they chose to focus on QSR(quick service restaurant), as food is necessity for everyone and there is a huge market.
2/Designing for experience
Ray mentioned what triggered him to have the idea of Ritual is when he was and UK and the bartender remembered his name and his order after he came back.He felt that it was such a unique and moving personalized experience, why not letting everyone enjoy their personalized experience?
3/Digital experience is only 1/2
In the experience we are trying to provide with customers, digital experience is just 50%. Just like Uber app, no matter how good the app is designed, if the driver doesn’t provide good service, the customers still feel uncomfortable. The same for Ritual, they always keep this the concept in mind and tried hard to improve the experience on the other side. For example, encourage merchants to personalize customer experience.
4/Digital wins on a different vector
Ray used the example of traditional camera and phone camera. Why people would like to use phone instead of camera even the quality is not that good? The answer is socializing and sharing. Think of what can do with digital that can’t be done in the reality.
The royalty card many restaurant used now is always forgotten or put in a corner at home. To solve this problem, Ritual let the app to remember how many times the customer has visited a specific restaurant and send promotion details at the right time. He used an example, a customer go to a restaurant biweekly, the app noticed this and sent him the promotion on the third week, the customer will only need to go a little bit more frequently then usual and enjoy the promotion.
The app also focus on 1-to-1 experience by collecting data from the customer, imagine when you come in and pick up, the server will call out your name, give you a nice smile and probably a special gift for you 10th visit…This is extremely hard in reality as but Ritual made it easy.
The Future of Food — KitchenMate, Ubery and UberEATs
KitchenMate aims to provide healthy and affordable food by food automation technology. The founder explained his motivation on concern of food waste, obesity and nutrition. People who are too busy or don’t have enough money have limited access to healthy food. By using food automation, the cooking procedure has been strictly and accurately programmed, less food and nutrition will be wasted and lost. In the future, digital pattern can be personalized and utilized to create more healthier and customized eating experience.
Ubery and Ben&Jelly has collaborated on food delivery. Simply ordering online, and the ice-cream will be at your front door in less than 30 mins. Ubery uses their own business model and algorithm to calculate the stock and traffic to make sure ice-cream will be delivered within time, and best quality.
Dan from UberEATs explained his vision of the future of food:
1/Any bite
There will be abundant food and people can have access to health and delicious food at any time, any where.
2/Deliver first
In the industry of QSR(quick service restaurant), people will focus more on delivery. There will be delivery-only restaurant because of delivery technology and high cost of labor and rent.
3/No more boring food
With the arisen of Pokeball, there will be more and more food trends impacted by other fields.
4/Farm to table
The improvement of supply chain will shorten the delivery time. Collaboration between farm and restaurant will make it possible that food is directly delivered from farm to table.
5/Data-driven eating
Eating habits and pattern can be digitalized and analyzed like other human behaviours.
6/Dish go viral
Creative food can lead a trend.
7/Long tail gets longer
(*I might be wrong about this point as I forgot to bring my notebook. So if you have a better summary please let me know!) There will be more inclusive and comprehensive choices for niche audience. Click here to learn about Long Tail Marketing if you are not familiar.
