How food apps are changing the restaurant industry

As a student of culinary arts programs, learning to cook is most likely your highest priority. If your goal is to one day open your own restaurant though, you might be interested in the new ways that food is being brought from the kitchen to the consumer. Cooking apps are becoming more apparent in the culinary world, with new apps being designed regularly to help consumers get the food they want to eat – usually as fast as possible.

Merging culinary with technology
Any number of new recipe, cooking and other apps are emerging all the time in the culinary world, but a new category of “pre-order” apps are directly connecting restaurants with consumers. Restaurants are starting to get on board with these apps that, for instance, allow customers to pre-order drinks or take-out food, so that they are ready upon arrival. The apps’ main goal? They’re making the consumer’s experience as easy as possible so that they can cash in on the simpler experience. Preo, an app based in New York City, lets customers order and pay for a drink at any number of NYC bars in a minimal number of steps.

“We’re taking the clunky point-of-sale systems and revamping them so that customers have a simple way of ordering for themselves,” Preo’s CEO Richard Liang told Reuters. Liang compared the new family of food apps to Uber, an app that allows people to order and pay for taxis on their smartphones – no wallet necessary.

FoodNow is another new app, this one for food deliveries, that’s also focused on streamlining the consumer’s experience. Programmer Hangrui Shi created the app after finding that online food delivery sites like GrubHub made the ordering process “more difficult than it needed to be,” according to The Fiscal Times. FoodNow uses a similar “swipe to reject” method that Tinder uses – the idea is that someone looking for food can swipe through a few options before finding something that sounds good, then order it easily.

What this means for the restaurant industry
These apps can’t grow without the backing of restaurants, but as more and more restaurants and bars jump on board, the apps become even more prevalent.

The relationship between consumer and restaurant is undoubtedly changing, which means eventually restaurateurs will have to get a little more technologically savvy as technology and the restaurant industry become even more intertwined.