Peekafood – Menu Assistant

Abstract

An issue that majority of the people face is regarding deciding where to dine-in and then deciding what to order. There are innumerable options available and with more choice, the decision becomes more difficult. Some people prefer to try out new food places and tell their friends and family whereas others like to wait for some good opinion before trying out a new place. People decide a place based on their mood, location, budget, existing discount deals and several other factors. Some information might be available on the internet but it will take a lot of your time to manually search about specific restaurants on different social media sites. You may not always have that luxury of beforehand research. You might already be on the road or you might be in a different locality. Once a person decides a place to dine-in, another issue is that restaurants are unable to provide a comprehensive visual representation of food items listed in their menu. The menu aims to be concise and informative, but in order to be precise, the element of visual accuracy is ignored. Furthermore, a physical menu is static by nature, it cannot be easily updated with prices, offers and special deals. If a customer orders something based solely on the name and description of an item without visual cues, they are often met with disappointment because of aspects such as serving size, or how appetizing the food looks. Restaurants rely on employees to inform their customers about serving size, any specials, offers and deals that may be ongoing. There is a factor of human error involved in this system. Our project aims to provide a system that allows a person to easily select a restaurant/café for dine-in based on some default pre-answered questions regarding his preferences, his location, customer feedback and some questions that he answers on run time and allows a simple restaurant menu to become dynamic, informative and visually comprehensive. Some of the challenges include managing large datasets, getting enough people to use the product to get meaningful and reliable data during the development stages as well as making a complete and market ready system in a short period of time. Some of the existing systems that digitize paper menu in Pakistan are Foodpanda which is a home delivery system and Kuks which has a wide scope which includes table reservations, dine-in, take-away and delivery whereas our Product scope is limited to dine-in. Peekafood will be a product of collaboration with Adlab Solutions to develop an interactive Android mobile application and a web portal which will help benefit the restaurants economically and as a whole will serve the general public by suggestions that are according to their eating habits. It will help save the environment by slowly getting rid of the paper based menu concept. It will enable restaurant owners to improve and learn using data analytics. Our team aims to build a scalable, easy to use and functional system.