Get Ready For ‘Food Tinder’

"I think we should see other people."
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"I think we should see other people."

There you are, alone with a growing desire which you hope to soon satiate. You want to know your options, so you try an app you’ve heard your friends murmuring about. Its interface allows you to swipe right or left depending on your personal tastes. When you see something you like, you start a discussion in hopes that there will be a spark. And if the response you get is positive? There is a stirring inside of you, a general enlivening of the spirit that can only be associated with one word: Possibility.

Maybe this time it will be special. Or maybe it’ll just be fun — something you want to enjoy again and again.

We’ve all been there, hungry and trying to figure out where to eat. The difficulty of matching humans with food that they’re excited about (and can agree on) is the problem that Jeong Uk Lee and John Kim are trying to solve with their app Foodie. It is, quite simply, Tinder for food. Instead of hooking you up with other people ready to have (hopefully) safe sex accompanied by varying degrees of guilt, it hooks you up with other people ready to have (hopefully) safe food accompanied by varying degrees of guilt.

Like Tinder, Foodie is based around “hotness.”

“We want to know where other people are around the location and then be able to give them what’s hot now,” Kim said to Tech Crunch. “That’s something Yelp doesn’t do; it shows you what was hot before, but it doesn’t show what’s trending now based on the weather. If it’s super hot, ice cream could be trending, for example.”

Unlike Tinder, Foodie wants to facilitate multi-person or group scenarios.

“We’re thinking of doing a chat room like Slack,” Kim said. “Think of this as a session and you invite your friends to this separately, and then when you go into it you see three people match and that [becomes] what all of us want.”

Foodie was part of Hackathon at TechCrunch 2015 so it’s still a little ways from launch, but the idea seems sound. Swipe right for donuts. Swipe right for tacos.

(Via: Tech Crunch)

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