Design and Development of a Restaurant Management App and a Recommendation Platform
1.89M
Restaurants in the database
With 15,000+ businesses listed online.
150,000+
Users
Across 91 cities in selection.
28
Months of work
On the project.
The client
Running a restaurant is only partly about food. Delivery, orders, bookings, food waste, hiring and administration all need managing daily, and though there is a digital tool for each of them, running dozens at once eats time and invites mistakes.
Meanwhile diners hunting for somewhere good start with recommendations in popular apps, where a large number of reviews says nothing about how far they can be trusted — the UK’s competition regulator found fake reviews influence £23bn of consumer spending a year.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
The idea came from a real experience: the co-founder ran a food truck company in Switzerland and saw the industry’s shadier practices at first hand.
Challenge 01Dozens of applications
Operating many tools at once consumes time a restaurant does not have and raises the risk of human error, onboarding included.
Challenge 02Reviews you cannot trust
Diners rely on recommendations whose credibility does not follow from their volume.
Challenge 03Two audiences at once
The platform had to serve restaurant owners and restaurant goers, which are different products sharing a database.
What we did
Restaurant management in one app, and a search engine that knows why you are eating
More than two years of work accelerated the product and reached several milestones the company had set.
One app instead of dozens
The entire management of a restaurant was centralised in a single application.
A database people can trust
A customer-facing platform was built on a strong database of proven food businesses rather than open submissions.
Recommendations with context
A proprietary metasearch engine makes recommendations personalised down to the occasion — somewhere suitable for a first date, somewhere to take your boss, somewhere good if you have coeliac disease.
Open to contributors
An API was built to be shared with possible contributors in future, which is how the company intends to become a standard for food tech.
Client testimonial
We had an initial idea worked out for months, but after a workshop that we had together I got surprised, because Netguru’s sketches were a hundred times better. Netguru had a firm stand in negotiations, but now we know where it came from, and we're extremely happy to be collaborating.
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What’s next