-Originally posted on TINC Magazine-
With a trained chef on staff, Food Genius helps users find new dishes they would like, using data from diner taste history and crowd sourcing.
TINC: Startup vs. Growth Company AKA - What stage are you in?
Food Genius is an early stage company; we’re currently in the process of building out our product and raising a Series A round. We have a great roster of Angel Investors, full of Chicago entrepreneurs, mentors and friends. Our consumer app is now live for Chicago and launches nationwide in October; our data products will be ready in December 2011.
TINC: Give us your Elevator Pitch!
Food Genius helps you discover and share your next favorite restaurant dish. By understanding what is in and about every dish, on every menu, and incorporating users’ taste history, we are able to produce highly accurate dish suggestions for what to eat when dining out.
At the core of how we suggest dishes is our business model: data. We are collecting and categorizing dining out consumer behavior to produce data products for the Restaurant and CPG industry, so they can better understand consumer behavior and trends.
TINC: Can you tell our readers more about the process and reach of the product or service you provide?
Currently we are tracking over 200,000 menus nationwide with a combined 11.6 million dishes. Not only do we track the dish as a whole, but we have parsed and normalized each ingredient to better understand the relationships between and among dishes. We are building an amazingly robust API for partners to utilize this data in the creation of their own services. We also have a Chicago consumer app, on the Android Marketplace or mobile web, where our 2,000 Chicago users are finding new dishes, rating their recent finds, and recommending dishes to their friends.
TINC: What industry would you most closely align your company with?
Consumer Data Services
TINC: What are common problems you see with the companies that your firm works with? How does your firm work to assist businesses with these problems?
We are trying to solve two problems for two different segments, one being restaurants, the other being consumers. First, restaurants don’t often use data to inform their decisions of what to offer their customers. There is a wealth of data that can help chefs, restaurant marketing firms, and frozen food producers, to understand what people want, where and why. We aim to have the most highly structured real time consumer intent data surrounding dining out.
Second, for consumers, we want to help solve the age-old question “where should we eat, right now?” We say it almost every day; to ourselves, our friends, our family, whether its 12:15pm at your office, 6:30pm on your way home from work, or out for a late night bite to eat. People would rather guarantee themselves a tasty meal by going to a place they have been before, than to venture out of their comfort zone to discover their next favorite dish. What we aim to do for consumers is provide a filter so you can discover new dishes that are made with the ingredients you know you love and that are recommended by people who eat similar dishes to you.
TINC: What makes you 'special'? How is your product different from the other guys?
We treat data differently than any other company who previously tried to solve this problem. We also have a classically trained chef on our team who helps to unlock the intricacies of food to provide a deeper level of understanding of how ingredients and preparation techniques inform flavor and how those elements inter-relate to become a final product.
TINC: How many employees do you have on board right now?
We have 10 people working on Food Genius either part- or full-time.
TINC: Who holds your top executive level positions? Why those roles?
Justin Massa is Founder and CEO, he has years of experience managing innovative data projects. Eric Cooper and Eli Rosenberg, our CTO and COO, respectively, have been working with Justin since inception. Eric previously was from Mozilla where he was part of the core dev team for SUMO, before that he worked at Brave New Films. Eli’s background includes Marketing/Operations with companies ranging from 12 to 14,000 employees. He most recently managed Online Marketing campaigns for SMG Search and Norvax, Inc in Chicago.
TINC: When was your company established? What is the official founding date?
Food Genius was established in earnest in October of 2010, but the team came together to start working on this problem the previous March.
TINC: Tell us about development platforms you may be using, or what you’re coding this in.
Python and Postgresql/PostGIS lie at the core of our platform, but Solr, Mongo, Memcache, Varnish, and Apache all play a role in our stack.
TINC: What is your technical approach that makes your software better? How are you getting the details right or working in a more optimized way?
Some things are private, jeez ;)
Our understanding of the intricacies and details of food are helping us build software with a human touch. For example, just because something is “creamy” doesn’t mean that is has “cream” (or even dairy, for that matter).
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