When Food beckons - FoodieBay, NeedGrub answer

Food - restaurant - home delivery related portals seem to surprisingly popular in India. Joining the genre of other startups like OrderMonger and HungryBangalore, are FoodieBay and NeedGrub.

FoodieBay is a new startup by IIT D alumni, which lists about 1200 restaurants and food joints from the Delhi - NCR region. Each listing also includes actual scanned menus, aggregated rating from other sources like HT, ToI, whether the restaurant does home delivery and what the average cost for a meal for two would be. The site has a simple navigation and UI and has been categorized pretty well according to the localities.

NeedGrub is an online restaurant guide, which lists restaurants by city. In terms of features, they have the regular fanfare that you’d expect from such a site - ratings, reviews, sharing, maps and rest of the works.  What the site lacks in terms of usability, it makes up in terms of the number of listings and the cities they cover. They seem to have pretty good coverage about various cities, including small towns like Trichy (what can I say, I’m biased towards Trichy since i attended college there).

The biggest catch for all these food - restaurant guides will be to carve a niche for themselves. They ought to find a USP that will send them into overdrive as compared to the other competitors.

What do you think ? Do you use any online service for locating restaurants / ordering food ? How’s your experience been and what advice would you have for some of these services ?

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Comments

4 Responses to “When Food beckons - FoodieBay, NeedGrub answer”

1. Gatuam Kshatriya on September 24th, 2008 4:20 am

   Will be interesting to see how these folks compete with HungryZone, who’ve managed to raise $500,000 in funding. I imagine that with this money the HZ chaps will be in a position to not only ramp up their features and interface, but also build up a content management / development staff to boslter up the number of restaurants featured on their site - a massive plus, when in fact when you visit a site in this space, you want the database of restaurants covered to be as big as possible.

   Gautam Kshatriya
   gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
   http://www.moneyvidya.com

2. nabil on September 25th, 2008 7:46 am

   Hi Pranav,

   I would like to answer to your question. Living in France, we have not yet a really good online restaurant guide (I mean with user reviews). It’s a shame! Because I really think there is a market and I cannot understand why no one has created one yet! However, for the trips I made abroad, USA, Egypt, Turkey, few days before the departure I always try to find out a good website with local restaurant reviews. So I think it is a really good business and if I can give an humble advice for this website entrepreneur is always privilegiate users reviews and experiences : a social network dedicated to foods!

3. Nav on September 26th, 2008 12:25 am

   I think HZ was probably a first mover, I like what Need Grub is doing … almost like a menupages.com like model. Two of my personal favorite food based apps are seamlessweb.com and gomobo.com. I’d love to see a gomobo.com like concept where restaurants don’t have to rely on fax machines, rather can accept orders via their mobile phones.

   https://subtledisruption.com
   https://navajeet.com

4. pranav on September 26th, 2008 1:15 pm

   @nabil,

   I agree - services like chowhound, yelp are great to find new places to eat. But I think its important to go a notch above your competitors and add some USP to your service.

   maybe a social network like approach is the way to go - i dont know for sure.