Pitch: dish.tv is Instagram for restaurants. It’s an iPhone app that makes it possible for restaurants to share a “making of” video and photo link with foodie customers. Collaboratively, they share their passion, over social media, at the level of an individual dish or drink. Imagine a tweet: “enjoying a latte at the Ferry Building Blue Bottle. My photo: flic.kr/… Now see the making of: youtu.be/… More: t.co/…”
This is one of a series of JFDI’s Requests for Startup. If this is the first you’ve read, you might like some context first.
Problem (end-user): I’m one of those foodies who photograph, blog, and tweet every dish they eat. But my picture of a dish looks a lot like everyone else’s picture of that dish. Boring, even with an Instagram filter. I want to take it to the next level with a “making of” video and photo gallery – of the instance, not just the class. To do that, I need the restaurant’s cooperation.
Problem (restaurant): I’m a high-end restaurant – not like the Russian Tea Room, more like Blue Bottle Coffee, an independent microbrewery, a hip mixology bar, or the Tippling Club. My chefs are food artists. I’m passionate about the food I produce, and I want to share that passion in a more authentic, on-brand way, with my patrons and, through them, their friends. Of course, F&B is competitive. Yes, social media is a way to drive traffic, but asking my patrons to check in on Foursquare is kind of lame. Ultimately I want the sort of engagement that brings me new customers and keeps my regulars coming back.
Solution: dish.tv is a two-sided app. On the restaurant side, the restaurant manager scatters a bunch of old iPods, iPhones, and webcams around the kitchen, mounted at the cooking stations. They stream photos and video to the dish.tv servers in the cloud. The dish.tv software backend automatically constructs a “making of” page for every single dish that gets served to every single customer, with a combination of photos and video, mixing prepared stock content with live content. When the dish is served to the customer, the restaurant concurrently presents a unique dish.tv link, in the form of a paper link or QR code. The customer can then retweet, blog, or otherwise share the link. They can see other patrons who’ve had that dish, and go straight to a review site to leave further commentary.
Trend Premise: Food blogging is a common human desire. Right now the alpha geeks and early adopters are doing it. In five years everyone will be doing it. The otaku drive that produces unboxing videos, super-technical reviews like Anandtech, and detailed end-user reviews on coffeegeek.com also can be found in food – in a much bigger way. After all, everybody’s got to eat. Thanks to Yelp and Foodspotting, now every customer can be a restaurant critic. It’s only fair that every restaurant should have its own TV show. This concept is part of the Modernist Cuisine movement.
Research: There are a bunch of iPhone apps that do video. Foodspotting has raised the granularity from restaurant to dish.
Why JFDI: Singapore is a food mecca. We take our food seriously here, and the country is a hotbed of F&B innovation. We probably have the world’s highest population of food bloggers per capita. And food appreciation is going mainstream all around the world. It’s not just Chez Panisse anymore.
Early adopters (restaurants): avant-garde food trucks like Kogi. Snooty Third Wave coffee shops like Intelligentsia. Geeky microbreweries. Wineries. Chocolateries. Bakeries.
Challenges: Installing the webcams where they won’t get steamed. Getting the data to the cloud. Getting the link to the customer. Assembling the per-instance content. Keying to a specific dish class and instance. Preparing the stock footage and photography. Graceful degradation.
Revenue Model: Restaurant subscription. Advertising. Value-add service sponsored by vendors to restaurants.
This is an RFS. Are you the right team to execute this concept? Stay tuned for details.