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How Food Genius built the ultimate test kitchen out of menu data

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:27:33 +0000

Chicago startup Food Genius knows what America is eating when it dines or orders out. It knows, for instance, whether more pizzerias are starting to put basil on their cheese and tomato pies or whether restaurants are still piling their burgers high with bacon or have switched over to avocado.

What’s more, Food Genius knows exactly how much more restaurants are charging for adding that sprinkling of basil to turn a standard pie into a pizza Margherita. Food Genius can tell you what hot combinations of ingredients, flavors and culinary buzzwords can boost the appeal – and thus the price – of a dish. In short, Food Genius has built the country’s biggest virtual test kitchen with menu data.

Food Genius has compiled a mammoth database of 100,000 unique menus from independent and chain restaurants around the country, giving it a massive data set to play with, said Justin Massa, Food Genius co-founder and CEO. The startup gets its data from some key menu aggregation partners, the biggest being fellow Chicago food outfit GrubHub. It also takes in readily available menu data from the national and regional restaurant chains, sometimes manually scraping data off of restaurants websites.

Any company can aggregate menus, Massa admits, but Food Genius is only using those raw lists of ingredients and dish descriptions as a starting point. It’s built parsing and categorization algorithms that break down those menu items into 14,000 ingredients, techniques and concepts that make up its internally developed culinary taxonomy. From there, it ferrets out the relationships between the items, like what categories they fall into and how different ingredients and techniques are commonly paired.

By crunching that data, Food Genius had generated more than 1 billion different food concepts, each of which represents a sort of meta-dish. Some of those concepts have been produced millions of times over in restaurants all over the country, like cheeseburgers, but many more are specific to individual restaurants. And others are just concepts inferred from Food Genius’s data.

Teaching a Kraft to cook like a Wolfgang Puck

While it might be tempting to think that Food Genius wants to use its data to automate the creative process of cooking, Massa quickly dispelled that notion. While Food Genius can suggest ingredient combinations based on patterns its database detects, pure math could never replace the chef, Massa said.

Instead, Food Genius is doing the opposite. It’s tracking trends in independent restaurants and relaying that information to big food companies – restaurant chains, food distributors, consultants and most importantly food manufacturers.

“The big food companies take it on faith that innovation starts in independent kitchens,” Massa said. “The problem is the lifecycle of product development at a company like Kraft is two years. Meanwhile, in an independent restaurant, a new dish could be conceived and executed in 30 minutes.”

Food trends are becoming ever more fleeting. Bacon in desserts or gourmet sliders may be hot concepts today, but they could become passé quickly. By using Food Genius’s database, food companies can identify food trends with true mass appeal, and they can latch onto those trends early. The last thing a major food manufacturer wants to do is invest large sums of money and time bringing to market a new line of frozen southwestern chicken entrees, only to discover that the consumers are now into Thai cuisine with pork.

“We want to give them the confidence that they can catch a trend within nine months, rather than within two years,” Massa said.

Taking food analysis to the next level

The company plans to take its service live in January, and already has half a dozen food industry consultants and food product manufacturers signed up. It’s selling its data through a licensing model, with monthly fees starting at $2,000 per user.

Food Genius is one of the growing number of companies to emerge from Excelerate Labs’ accelerator program in Chicago. In September, it raised a $1.2 million funding round led by Hyde Park Venture Partners and Hyde Park Angels with participation by New World Ventures, IDEO, Amicus Capital and I2A Fund.

Massa said right now its customers are using Food Genius data to develop their own food concepts, but as the company scales it hopes to offer more custom analysis. Instead of trying to identify food trends themselves, Food Genius will tell them what trends they should be paying attention to, Massa said.

The startup is also looking for ways to refine its data by tracking what diners are actually ordering, not just what restaurants are offering. Knowing what dishes are in the menu doesn’t tell you which ones are popular. Food Genius would like to delve deeper into sentiment analysis, but Massa will that such data-mining techniques aren’t fully baked, especially when it comes to people’s mercurial tastes in food.

Food Genius could start pairing specific restaurant dishes with reviews in Yelp or dish sightings on apps like Foodspotting, but the information it would gather would be of questionable value.

“Say there’s this one guy who has written 10 Yelp reviews about 10 different brisket dishes he’s had, and he hated every single one of them,” Massa said. “Does he really hate brisket? Or does he really love it? Clearly he’s going to order brisket again at the next place he goes to.”

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko; Dining photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Everett Collection

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Meet Chefs Feed, the anti-Foodspotting

Kevin Fitchard — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 16:00:09 +0000

Running a restaurant recommendation app is not necessarily as glamorous as one might think. Especially when you’ve made a conscious decision to limit your contributors to the superstars of the food world.

When Jared Rivera founded Chefs Feed with his brother Steve Rivera in 2011, he was living the foodie dream. He had to fly all over the U.S. to interview some of the country’s most acclaimed chefs for a series of video spots shown for Virgin America, Chefs Feed’s primary sponsor.

He visited 500 restaurants and as you might expect, he got to some pretty amazing food in the process. He also gained 25 lbs. and contracted gout. When he got back to San Francisco he walked on crutches for weeks. “He sacrificed his body for Chefs Feed,” CEO Steve Rivera quipped in an interview with GigaOM.

At first glance Chefs Feed seems like so many other social eating/food porn apps like Foodspotting, Forkly and Nosh. It’s rife with pictures of luscious dishes from acclaimed restaurants, but you quickly notice what’s missing.

There is no way for you or I to upload a dish photo or make a dish recommendation, and the Riveras like it that way. The only people who can recommend a dish are the 600 professional chefs that make up the Chefs Feed roster of curators. From the Riveras perspective, serious eaters want to know where Mario Batali (Babbo, Lupa) eats in New York and what Thomas Keller (French Laundry) eats in San Francisco — not the selections of some random dude with a smartphone and a few too many whiskey sours.

That might sound snobby, but then again “foodie” is just a newer word for “food snob”. Chefs Feed is going after the type of diner that obsesses about their meals, and that audience doesn’t want just anyone recommending what food they eat.

The web and mobile apps have done wonderful things for the democratization of the restaurant review. We’re no longer dependent on an elite group of food critics to tell us where and what to eat. Instead we crowdsource, each of us handing out stars on Yelp and uploading images to Foodspotting. But the Riveras — who ran a restaurant public relations firm before committing full time to Chefs Feed – would argue crowdsourcing has gone too far. By soliciting everyone’s opinion, you really have gotten no opinion at all.

Chefs Feed’s approach splits the difference. Rather than aggregate the recommendations of critics or the masses, it collects the opinions of professionals successful in their craft. For the most part, those chefs run their own restaurants and several are celebrities in their own right — such as Keller, Batali, and Wolfgang Puck — while many would only be known to people who closely follow their local food scenes. A participating chef can recommend and upload a photo of any dish, as long as it’s not one of their own.

When Chefs Feed launched last year it was a pretty bare-bones iPhone app, allowing you to select one of four cities and then giving you a list of dishes from specific restaurants that local chefs had recommended. Since then, Chefs Feed has expanded to 15 U.S. cities and overseas to London, and in October it launched a new version of its iPhone app that adds much more information about individual dishes, chefs and restaurants.

But the new version also adds a layer of social networking, so Chefs Feed users aren’t reduced to passive participants. Only chefs can add new dishes, but users can comment on those choices, communicating with chefs and their friends.

“You can eat your way through San Francisco, and show all of the dishes you’ve tried,” Steve Rivera said. But the app is meant to be more than just a recommendation engine, he added. It’s meant to be a tool for connecting chefs to the public, allowing them to communicate directly with their patrons and fans as well as participate in a larger dialogue with the culinary community in their cities. Chefs aren’t just submitting their own dish recommendations, they’re actively commenting on the picks of other chefs and feedback left by diners, Rivera said.

Ultimately the Steve and Jared Rivera want Chefs Feed to grow into a digital media company, becoming a specialized network where professional chefs will promote their restaurants, food, cookbooks and future plans. The company still has a lot of growing to do, though. Chefs Feed is still only available on the iPhone, where it has been downloaded about 200,000 times. Compared to the food mega-apps like Yelp and Foodspotting, it’s tiny. But Chefs Feed has raised $1 million in angel funding, and it’s not just attracting the attention of some of the country’s most prominent chefs. It’s attracting interest in Silicon Valley tech circles. Former Twitter VP of product Satya Patel and former Expedia CFO Mike Adler have signed on as advisors.

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