Foodi Menus is a West Coast startup changing the face of restaurant menus.
With the hospitality industry bearing the brunt of the current labor shortage, the food-service space can't afford to risk providing its customers with a sub-par experience. As mobile delivery services continue taking 30% of every order, the situation for restaurants, bars, and other dining establishments is grim at best.
Enter, Foodi - an innovative smart-menu platform enabling non-technical restaurateurs to easily create compelling, interactive, and mobile-optimized experiences. In a tech-averse industry barely surviving the pandemic, we provide an intuitive menu system to better cater to and engage customers, drive personal interactions, dynamically adjust offerings, and effortlessly optimize marketing.
Foodi was born out of frustration with early QR code menu experiences during the food-service industry's initial response to the pandemic. By now we've all had our fair share of struggling to navigate a PDF menu from a phone while attempting to order - but for Foodi founder Ben Fisher, once was enough. The initial 5 seconds after his first QR code scan were full of delight with the innovative experience before him, the next 10 seconds - mainly confusion and annoyance. By the 30 second mark, the inspiration for Foodi had taken root and has continued to guide him ever since.
The First Pivot
Setting out with no more than an idea, a marketing degree, and 2 years of management experience, within 365 days of his first QR code menu scan Ben had developed an MVP and was ready to bring it to market... or so he thought.
After a summer of testing for market-fit and coming up empty handed, Ben consulted with the rest of the Foodi team and came to the realization that they had missed the boat with QR code menus. This was the start of Foodi's first major pivot.
Up until that point the Foodi messaging approach was built around the concept of offering restaurants a replacement for their current QR code system directing to a PDF menu. But the initial problem that started Foodi wasn’t a lack of systems for managing a QR code menu. The real problem was that PDFs were never intended to be used for mobile menus, whether or not a QR code is involved - and the PDF alternatives were not much better. As such, the Foodi messaging was updated to promote a system to easily manage a compelling mobile-friendly menu - no matter where it's displayed.
What we provide is a trustworthy menu. So when you go to a restaurant’s website or when you scan a QR code at your favorite bar or when you find a new food cart on Google or Yelp or through social media, you can trust that you will be able to not only view a Foodi menu from your phone, but easily understand it. With this vital shift in key messaging, the Foodi Menus team identified another opportunity that had previously been thought of as a competitor due to their QR code focus: Website Designers.
Expanding the Market
By partnering with website designers, digital marketing agencies, and brand management firms, the Foodi system finally started to gain traction in the industry. Because the system was initially designed for use by foodservice teams, web design outfits could now offer dynamic, customizable, and modern menu experiences to a much wider range of hospitality customers than they could at their prior price-point for comparable capabilities.
As we look towards the future, the Foodi Menus team is staying true to Ben's initial vision. While our competitors see food-service menus as an afterthought, we realize that a smart-menu is the key to an effective, efficient, and enticing end-to-end dining experience. Instead of offering complicated features built for a few large corporations with extensive teams, we're prioritizing features that improve self-service, better catering to the 70% of the market composed of do-it-yourself restaurateurs.
"As the world evolves to offer more interconnected and customizable experiences, expect to see more Foodi menus delivering food-service displays optimized for the masses' high-tech appetite." -Ben Fisher, Foodi Menus Founder and CEO