Foodspotting App Adds Dish Recommendations to the Menu

The Foodspotting app now provides individualized recommendations. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

It seems like you can’t step into a restaurant with out seeing tables complete of people breaking out their smartphones and snapping pictures of their meals before diving in. That is the hot trend in Wired’s San Francisco home base, at least, and it’s mostly tied to Foodspotting, a food discovery app that lets you take and post images of food dishes to create visual menus for restaurants.

Nowadays, Foodspotting is adding yet another level of utility to its app: dish suggestions. A feedback-based recommendation engine pairs with heavier social media integration to support make deciding what to order a considerably simpler process.

“Most folks use Foodspotting for browsing and bookmarking dishes, and attempting them nearby,” founder Alexa Andrzejewski said. “A lot of our users aren’t super into the picture-taking, so the app has been redesigned with that in thoughts.”

The new Foodspotting app is some thing of a “Pandora for food.” You can now tell the app what you love and what you hate thanks to a contextual menu to the left of every single delicious-seeking photo. If, for example, you’re lactose intolerant, you can filter away all the dairy-based items that pop up. Ultimately, the app will discover that you do not like those items, and they’ll be hidden from your recommendation feed. The more “loves” and “hates” you define in the app, the a lot more correct its recommendations will be.

The app also gets heavier social media integration, so you can uncover what items your pals on Facebook (and your existing Foodspotting follows) advise when you view a specific dish. Moreover, you can see if “experts” love a distinct dish — if, for instance, you are not a fan of your friends’ tastes.

An “expert” is somebody who’s created an affinity for a particular kind of dish, and has logged images and opinions of dish variations on Foodspotting. Take macaroni and cheese. If you “love” a handful of mac ‘n’ cheese dishes, the app will discover a pattern and start providing you recommendations from other macaroni and cheese experts. You will also be provided ideas of related dishes, like mac and cheese eggrolls, or various versions of the dish from distinct restaurants you may possibly not have tried yet.

“Whether you trust magazines, buddies, or just your personal tastes, you will have all that data to make a choice now,” Andrzejewski stated. Foodspotting’s Guides feature lets you check out best eats from nearby publications, like 7×7 Magazine and Zagat.

The new version of the app shares the exact same overall aesthetic of older iterations. In the leading corners you can search for a certain type of dish, or check out a map to uncover restaurants in your vicinity. A horizontal menu wheel lets you speedily toggle among six various sections: Specials, Nearby, Very best, Most recent, Following and Me. In all but the Specials section, you get Foodspotting’s familiar side-scrolling array of mouth-watering food photographs, every with an X on the left and a star on the appropriate. The star gives you the capability to label a dish as a Want, Tried it, or Love it.

Across the bottom of the screen, you can switch from Discover (which consists of all of the functions mentioned above) to Places, which lists restaurants in order of distance from your present location. You can Spot food items to share a dish you advise peruse Guides for specialist lists and suggestions from publications or tap Follow to comply with new individuals, areas and foods, or view your profile.

Foodspotting’s new app also integrates nicely with its lately released Facebook Timeline app. The Timeline app shows items like regardless of whether you want a dish, if you’ve currently tried it, and regardless of whether you’ve tried it and love it.

Those with a keen eye will also discover Foodspotting revamped its “I (camera) food” logo, de-emphasizing the camera. The logo now looks either like a piece of pie with a bite taken out, or a camera lens.

Right after two years in the App Store, Foodspotting now has a library of far more than one million images of restaurant dishes, and an active community of users. Foodspotting is readily available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Foodspotting is not just “Instagram for food” any longer. Image: Foodspotting