Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Google Maps

Amazon May Grab Food Tech Headlines, but You Should Be Paying More Attention to Google

Amazon grabs a lot of attention when it comes to food tech. And rightly so, as the company bought Whole Foods, offers grocery delivery, is revolutionizing convenience stores, and so much more. But perhaps it should be its rival, Google, that we pay more attention to.

Google may not immediately spring to mind when you think of food, but the tech giant has been steadily adding features to its apps throughout the first half of this year. When you lay them out on the page, it becomes pretty apparent that Google has quietly becoming a food tech giant with a growing power that’s shaping where and how we eat.

Let’s take a look at the more recent food-related features Google has launched. So far in 2019, it has:

This doesn’t even take into consideration the work Google researchers are doing with robotics in the kitchen!

In the age of the attention economy, it’s not that hard to understand why Google busily adding more food related features to its roster. Everyone, everywhere eats. If it can make that eating more “frictionless,” to borrow a Silicon valley phrase, then you are more likely to stay in Google’s ecosystem. The more you use Google, the more data they collect from you to make more apps that, in the company’s mind, will make eating out, or order in, better (and make Google more money).

A lot of these features are just natural extensions of tasks we are already doing. Google Assistant is an assistant, having an AI act like one to make reservations (even with its ethical complications) on your behalf is the logical evolution of that product. If you’re searching for a restaurant online then it’s a pretty good bet that you want to either eat there or get food delivered from there, so why not surface popular dishes and provide a delivery option.

Amazon may dominate our online shopping and most headlines, but a lot of what they are doing is vertically integrated: they own the grocery store, the online shopping all the way down to the delivery. (Though businesses like AWS certainly help food tech startups operate and it has recently invested in Deliveroo .)

Google is embedding itself further up the stack closer to our actual decision making. This gives it a much bigger and more direct influence over how we will eat. If you’re searching for the next big player in Food Tech, you don’t have to Google it.

Google Maps Adds Popular Dish Feature to Surface Favorite Meals at Restaurants

Google Maps has always helped navigate you to a nearby restaurant, but with a new feature launched today, Maps will help you navigate that restaurant’s menu by surfacing its most popular dishes.

The popular dishes feature uses machine learning to parse through photos and reviews of dishes posted by Google Maps users and identify a restaurant’s most popular meals. The new feature is available now on Android with an iOS version to follow later. From a Google blog post announcing the service:

Simply pull up a restaurant on Google Maps to find its popular dishes in the overview tab. Feeling extra peckish? Dive into the menu tab to scroll through all the most-talked about meals, and tap on a popular dish to explore reviews and photos. In a country where you can’t read the language? Maps will also translate the reviews for you too.

Google has certainly been interested in feeding you lately. Last week, the company announced a feature that allows Google Maps, Search and Assistant users to order food for delivery directly through those apps. Earlier this month, the company revealed a new Google Lens feature that let users point their phone cameras at a menu to bring up pictures of popular meals. And there’s also, Google Duplex the human-sounding AI assistant that can make restaurant reservations for you.

It’s not hard to connect the dots to see where all this is going. Knowing what restaurants are nearby, what type of cuisine they serve and what their most popular dishes are creates the foundation for an even more powerful AI assistant. Why should Duplex stop at making restaurant reservations when it could also order your food for home delivery? While this is useful on your phone, having this kind of functionality on a Google Smart Hub smart screen would be equally powerful for families ordering dinner. Google can recommend the restaurant, suggest dishes and then automatically have it delivered to your door.

Getting your purchase history and surrounding data (when you ordered, etc.) would provide Google even more data to power its algorithms, and the company is pretty upfront about wanting that data. From the Popular Dishes blog post today:

At the end of the day, this feature is made possible because of contributions from people around the world who want to help others using Google Maps. So if you want to pay it forward to the next dinner, simply take a photo of your meal (before you’ve scarfed it down!) and add a dish name so others can know what’s good on the menu.

Of course, in a world where we freely hand over so much information about ourselves, at some point you have to ask: who, exactly, is being served?

Is Google Maps Adding Food Identification and Ratings?

If you’re the type who takes pictures of your food and uploads them while still at the restaurant, you may soon be getting prompted by Google Maps to identify and rate your meal, according to a story from Ausdroid.

The publication’s description is vague: “When you add a new photo, Maps will ask you to name the dish and present you with a fairly comprehensive list of meals as autocomplete options.” Adding the new photo to what, it isn’t entirely clear.

However, their post does have screenshots showing a picture of a food item which, from the looks of it, has been identified by Google as taken near a restaurant. Google then goes on to ask what the menu item is, as well as your thumbs up or down on that particular dish.

We’ve sent a note to Google asking them to confirm Ausdroid’s report, and will update this story as we hear more.

As Ausdroid writes, on its face, this is another vector for Google to gather information on you to provide better recommendations. In addition to wait times at a particular restaurant, it could also tell you which specific dishes are popular.

This is in line with news out of the recent Google I/O conference, where it was announced that Google Maps will soon be providing users with a host of new features, including a personalized match score for restaurants. A Google rep told Travel + Leisure that the score indicates “how likely you are to enjoy a food or drink spot based on your unique preferences.”

But, as is often the case with Google, there is a larger data play here for the company. Having potentially millions of food images properly labeled is immensely useful for Google’s AI and machine learning algorithms. Additionally, having pictures taken under all sorts of conditions (different angles, poorly lit, etc.) and then labeled also helps Google better understand the real world better.

Restaurants seem to be of particular interest for Google. At that same I/O conference, the company trotted out a demo of its human-sounding virtual assistant, Duplex, which supposedly is able to make restaurant reservations on your behalf (though doubts about its full capabilities have arisen). Everyone eats, so there are ample opportunities for data collection, and restaurants can be at the center for a number of Google products: Maps, Calendars, Email, Chat, site hosting/web page creation.

Have you seen this ratings feature in the wild? If so, send us a screenshot!