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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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ChowNow Partners With Instagram for Online Ordering Via Stories

Online ordering platform ChowNow today announced a partnership with Instagram to offer restaurant orders through the social media app, according to a press release from ChowNow.

Participating restaurants that are also ChowNow clients can add an “Order Now” button or sticker to their food images and videos on Instagram. When a user clicks the button, they are directed to the restaurants online ordering platform, which is powered by ChowNow and can process the transaction, including payment. 

One of ChowNow’s big selling points is the commission-free aspect of its online ordering systems. Restaurants partner with ChowNow and pay the company a flat fee to power their online ordering, bypassing the need to use third-party delivery services like DoorDash or Grubhub. That means restaurants focusing on takeout or that operate their own delivery fleet can (in theory, at least), ditch those third-party delivery services, whose commission fees are the subject of much controversy. (Restaurants that drivers would still have to factor in that cost with third parties.)

Small restaurants in dense, urban areas like NYC that don’t need scores of drivers could especially benefit from a system like ChowNow’s. And with the current global pandemic shutting dining rooms down and forcing restaurants to get creative about how they do business, more and more in the industry are promoting the importance of takeout orders.

Whether they’re doing takeout, delivery, or some combination of both, restaurants would be wise to take advantage of the new ChowNow-Instagram partnership. Instagram has become an invaluable marketing tool for restaurants over the last few years. Now, as today’s press release notes, “food images and videos are a mainstay of Instagram Stories.” That’s more true than ever, at a time when people are staying home and people are spending even more time on their devices.

Instagram users will also be able to re-share restaurant Stories that include Order buttons on their own Stories. The new feature is effective today for ChowNow restaurant clients.

Sourdough Bread is Taking over Instagram Right Now

If you’ve scrolled through Instagram lately, you’ve probably noticed a sudden uptick in people posting about their #quarantinelife baked goods. But one in particular has people Insta-bragging like never before: sourdough bread.

Really, it makes so much sense that people are hopping on the sourdough bread train. Making it requires very few inputs (just flour and water), but also demands frequent care throughout a day — the kneading, proofing, and baking process takes around 24 hours total. But the end results are utterly delicious, even for inexperienced bakers. And bonus, you don’t have to go to the grocery store and risk contamination to get your bread!

As with many things in our digitally connected life — like workouts, beauty tutorials, and more — people feel the need to share their baking exploits on Instagram. In fact there are 2.7 million posts tagged #sourdough on the ‘gram right now. The fact that NYT Cooking’s lead newsletter story this week was about making your own sourdough means that we’ll likely be seeing a lot more #artisanbread posts coming our way over the next few weeks.

My first attempt at sourdough bread. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Being a good millennial, I had to try my hand at sourdough this week. I’d gotten a starter from a friend which had laid dormant in my fridge. A few days of feeding later, plus an intensive 24 hours of kneading, resting, and proofing near the heater in my bedroom, and I had two pretty good loaves of sourdough!

Did I share it on Instagram? Of course I did. And I got comments back of people sending me their own photos of sourdough, focaccia, pretzels, and other yeasty endeavors. One friend and I decided that we would do a loaf exchange for our next round of sourdough baking. Another asked me to drop off some of my starter so she could start baking, too.

Unfortunately, my sourdough ambitions are on hold at the moment since every grocery store I’ve visited over the past few days has been 100 percent out of flour. Which just goes to show — if social media didn’t illustrate the point enough already — that we’re all baking to relieve stress and feed our loved ones. Because when everything seems uncertain and sometimes downright scary, it’s reassuring to care for something else — even if that something else is just a sourdough starter.

Just don’t forget to post your results on Instagram. #Sourdough #naturallyleavened #wildyeast

Delish to Host Instagram Live Cooking Classes for Parents and Kids

If you’re a parent working from home with kids out of school, chances are you’re on the lookout for creative ways to distract them — hopefully while they learn some things.

Maybe one of those things will be how to cook. Recipe platform Delish is launching an Instagram Live series to teach parents and kids how to cook together.

According to an email from Delish, the series will be hosted by the platform’s editorial director Jo Saltz and her children. Episodes will air each weekday at 1:00pm ET and last 15 to 20 minutes (the first episode aired today). If you can’t tune in at that time, episodes will be saved in a Highlights section of Delish’s Instagram so you can watch when you’re ready.

Each #CookingTogether lesson will feature “kid friendly” recipes like pizza waffles and something called puppy chow (which I just had to Google and must say, I now want very badly).

Healthy? Not exactly. But kids can be picky, and if you’re already fighting a battle trying to keep them educated and entertained it’s not exactly the time to try and sell them on broccoli, too.

I don’t have kids myself, but I think Delish’s #CookingTogether series is a smart way for the recipe brand to make the best of the current situation — and differentiate themselves from other recipe site competitors. While people are quarantined at home they’re looking for both inspiration on what to cook and free ways to entertain themselves (and their children).

I bet before the coronavirus pandemic has died down, we’ll be seeing a lot of recipe services experimenting with new tactics to cater to the new normal.

Newsletter: Nigella Lawson’s Instagram Competitor and the Coolest Foodtech Startups at Y Combinator

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

If you’re a food tech polymath — interested in a little of this, a little of that — then this was your week.

First and foremost: We’ve got your food celebrity fix. This week the Food Network fangirl in me was excited to hear that chef/cookbook author Nigella Lawson has launched a new app that helps food-lovers take better pics of their meals. We might have an Instagram competitor on our hands! Called FOODIM, the app is currently only available in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. But I for one can’t wait to download it and see if it can make my avocado toast (sorry, millennial) look better than my go-to Instagram Ludwig filter.


via GIPHY

Speaking of new and exciting ventures, Y Combinator recently released the lineup for its 2019 Winter cohort: a whopping 200 companies. We sifted through the list to pick out the 10 food tech startups you should know, from a smart coffee scale to autonomous advertising robots.

We were especially excited to see Shiok Meats included in the list. The company is the first cell-based meat company to be accepted into the coveted accelerator, which means that cellular agriculture is heading towards the mainstream — or at least more investment.

Though they’ll be decamping to Silicon Valley for Y Combinator, Shiok Meats is actually based in Southeast Asia — which is where we (and others) are predicting cultured meat will first come to market. I took a deep dive this week into the reasons cell-based meat will first be available in Asia, not Silicon Valley. TL;DR: keep your eyes trained on Hong Kong, people.

Another company in the latest Y Combinator batch is creating a homemade-meal sharing marketplace. Shef is like AirBnB but for home-cooked meals. In the U.S., peer-to-peer home cooking networks are relatively new. In fact, they only became legal a few months ago with the passage of the law AB 626 in California.

In India, however, the home chef marketplace is already pretty hot. This week Chris profiled FoodCloud, a platform connecting home cooks with nearby hungry diners. Guess who’s using it to make a killing? Grandmas.

In other news:

  • Starbuck’s announced it will invest an eye-popping $100 million into a new venture fund to help incubate new up-and-coming food and retail tech startups.
  • The founder and ex-COO of Blue Apron launched a new venture aimed at reversing climate change through regenerative agriculture, starting with heritage chickens.
  • Amazon meal kits made their long-anticipated move into Whole Foods, which will give the e-commerce company another sales channel and more of their absolute favorite thing: data.

Finally — are you in San Francisco? (Or do you want an excuse for a quick trip?) Join us at ArticulATE, our one-day conference on all things food robotics and automation! This week we did a Q&A with Ryan Tuohy of Starship Technologies — the company that makes the wee food delivery rover bots — to get a taste of how automation will shape the future of food delivery. Snag your tickets today to hear him as well as speakers from Google, Sony, Albertson’s and more. Use code NEWSLETTER10 for a 10% discount!

Move Over, Instagram, Nigella Lawson Launches Photo App for Taking Better Food Pics

Posting pics of your meals on Instagram is de rigeur for the modern-day eater. However, there is still a huge gulf between what you snap and share versus the gorgeous photos done by the pros.

To help minimize that gap between foodie and photog, famed cook and cookbook author Nigella Lawson announced Foodim, a new photo app to help the average (sloppy?) Joe take better pictures of their meals. From a post Lawson’s website:

…I’ve been working for some time with my longtime cameraman to develop a food photography app with a built-in filter designed to optimise food and a back-of-shot blur dependent on the angle of the phone (as well as a draw-to-blur feature) to give depth of field. And I’m very excited to say that FOODIM is now available (just on iOS for now – but hopefully on Android soon) in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. And it’s free! So you have nothing to lose by giving it a whirl, and you can download it here.

Given those geofencing restrictions, we can’t download and test it out. However, these are some of the features listed on the download page:

    Caption your photos, add your recipes, notes or location as wished, and share with your friends and followers.

    Browse to see what everyone’s cooking and eating, get inspired, and connect with a welcoming community.

    Features:

  • Foodim’s auto-applied filter helps you point, shoot and share beautiful food images in an instant
  • Advanced editing tools – add depth of field with draw-to-blur, contrast, colour temperature and more
  • Add notes, your recipes or location – share your discoveries, restaurants and passion for food
  • Save photos as drafts (so you can edit and post them after you’ve eaten)

So Foodim is more than just a photo app, it’s also creating a mini-social network dedicated to food photography. Given the popularity of food photography and the cesspool that more general social network comments have become, this is a shrewd move by Lawson. If she can build a substantial enough audience on her app, she’ll also have an engaged audience to enjoy Lawson’s own pictures of food, which could in turn inspire people to buy her books.

If you’re a Spoon reader in the UK, Australia or New Zealand, download the app and send us a pic!

Instagram’s Getting Into Restaurant Reservations With a New Partnership

Instagram just announced it will enable in-app restaurant reservations thanks to a new partnership with reservation platform Quandoo. That means you can now search for a restaurant and book it just by hitting a button and without ever leaving the Instagram environment.

Quandoo is currently in 12 different countries across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Users can search 17,000-plus restaurants on the Quandoo website or mobile app, and quickly book a table reservation.

But it’s the restaurants themselves that stand to reap a lot of benefit from using a service like Quandoo, which can function as a reservations-management system and marketing services platform rolled into one. Those marketing services include everything from custom websites that integrate with the Quandoo reservations platform to newsletter placement to social media strategies. Restaurants can choose from different pay-per-month plans that range in price and the number of services. Ultimately, Quandoo helps restaurants handle more bookings per table and therefore generate more revenue.

The deal means restaurants have an even larger potential audience and/or customer base, as well as a means to make businesses more searchable and shareable. Facebook may still be the top social network, but Instagram, alongside WhatsApp, is inching closer (Facebook owns both companies). Plus, Instagram’s been dabbling in the restaurant biz a few years now, getting involved with everything from pay-by-picture concepts, where users get a meal in exchange for uploading and tagging a photo, to helping change cocktail culture by demystifying the concept of mixology.

Quandoo is not available in the U.S., but similar strategies are nonetheless at work—Instagram already has partnerships with Grubhub, Resy, and OpenTable.

Given that food has always been a popular topic to document on Instagram, it makes sense the company is playing an increasingly bigger role in the restaurant industry and will keep doing so in the future, for reservations or otherwise.

Can #RecipeForDisaster Help Us Stop Wasting So Much Food?

By this point, you’ve probably heard the (admittedly sobering) stats a few times over: according to the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted — almost half of all the fruits and vegetables we grow. At the same time, almost a billion people around the world go hungry. There are quite a few apps trying to reduce the amount of food waste, or redistribute excess food to those in need.

A new social media campaign from the World Food Programme (WFP) wants you to turn food waste from a recipe for disaster into a, well, #RecipeForDisaster. WFP hopes that this hashtag will spark a social media movement that will draw attention to food waste and highlight simple ways that people can reduce their wasted food at home. Here’s how it works:

#RecipeForDisaster: Join the Fight Against Food Waste

The campaign asks you to make a meal out of ingredients that will soon expire, then share photos (or videos) of the dish with the hashtag #RecipeForDisaster. (Be forewarned: A search for that hashtag on Instagram will turn up some odd images that are very much not food-related.) The video also suggests you make a donation to the WFP to help them reach their goal of eradicating world hunger by 2030.

An article in The Guardian argued that millennials’ obsession with Instagraming their food has heightened our expectations about what food should look like, prompting us to buy more than we need and reject perfectly edible food, just because it doesn’t look as nice as it used to. By promoting photos of dishes made with less-than-perfect-looking ingredients, the #RecipeForDisaster campaign hopes that they can fight this trend.

#RecipeforDisaster isn’t the first social campaign to draw awareness to food waste. Perhaps most prominent is Ugly Food & Veg, an Instagram account with over 40K followers that reposts photos of oddly-shaped produce. Imperfect Produce‘s Instagram account, which has with over 68K followers, also highlights nonconventional (“ugly”) fruits and vegetables, as well as ways to use up the entirety of your produce.

Photos from Imperfect Produce’s Instagram.

#RecipeforDisaster could go further than some of these other accounts by asking the consumer to contribute content. If they can gain enough traction (and in the unpredictable realm of social media, that’s a big “if”), they could go far in promoting awareness about a critical issue in our food system. They’re not off to a bad start: the hashtag currently features in 6,300 posts using the hashtag on Instagram and many more on Twitter, including posts from celebrity chef like José Andres. But in our age of constant stimulation, it’s hard to keep anyone’s attention for too long — even on issues as pressing as food waste.

So next time you have an extra brown banana in your fruit bowl, don’t throw it away — turn it into banana bread and post it to the gram with #RecipeforDisaster.

Feast Your Eyes on These Weird & Wonderful Instagram Feeds

Ah, Instagram. You keep us entertained in airports, waiting for the bus, and standing in line at the post office. You keep us up to date on our acquaintance’s lives and celebrity’s lives. Sometimes you even inspire us.

If you want to add some delicious, weird, and informative food-focused Instagrams into your feed, we’ve got seven to scroll through.

@smallhold.co: Mushroom lovers, this one’s for you. Smallhold is a subscription-based fungi minifarm, and NYC’s only mushroom farm.

 

@dinarakasko: Pastry chef Dinara Kasko makes crazy beautiful edible geometric sculptures using 3D-printed molds, which she sells on her website.

 

@impossiblefoods: A must-follow for anyone that loves adorable anthropomorphized burgers, bright colors, and Impossible’s plant-based “bleeding” burgers.

 

@kitchensuspension: This Italian account features kitchen ingredients and tools in… suspension. It’s wild and disorienting and a fun “how’d they do that,” though the photos sometimes feature creepy dyed hands.

 

@modcuisine: Wacky, mind-bending, and guaranteed to make you hungry, Modernist Cuisine’s Instagram has some seriously high-class photography.

 

@uglyfruitandveg: Celebrating oddly-shaped produce in all its glory. This Instagram’s goal is to reduce food waste by showing off misshapen produce that would normally be tossed, but it can also be just plain funny.

 

@paulfuentes_design: This Instagram of Mexican artist Paul Fuentes is whimsical and inventive. It makes you look at food not just as an object to be eaten, but one to be played with.

What’s your favorite food-related Instagram account? Did we miss any? Tell us in the comments or on social media at @thespoontech!

 

Knorr’s “Eat Your Feed” Delivers Instagram-Inspired Recipes… Sorta

Millennials everywhere can finally justify all those overhead photos they just had to snap (and then Instagram) before digging into their food.

Knorr, the powdered soup and seasoning brand owned by Unilever, has developed an AI-powered tool which scans your Instagram feed and then recommends recipes based on your photos. Dubbed Eat Your Feed, the tool uses visual recognition technology to match your food snaps with recipes from Knorr’s database. After you get your recommendations, you can save the recipes or add the ingredients to a digital shopping basket. And if you’re not already on the ‘gram, don’t worry — you can use this short quiz on Knorr’s website to get personalized recipes.

In the spirit of thorough journalism, I decided to give Eat Your Feed a try.

After entering in my Instagram login information, the webpage whirred around a bit before directing me to a page of almost completely nonsensical recipe matches.

First up was a photo I took of burgers & fries (it was actually the Impossible Burger, but I wouldn’t expect Eat Your Feed to know that). I would have expected it to match this to a perhaps another burger recipe, or even a grilling one, but instead I got… chicken and pasta soup?

As I scrolled through my recommendations, some of Eat Your Feed’s logic became clear. Some. For example, a photo I’d posted of some seaside cliffs linked to a recipe for Mussels Meuniere. However, most of the tool’s process was still shrouded in mystery: why did a painting of a cake equate to spinach soup? What linked a photo I took of a cave in Greece to a lemony pasta dish?

Presumably, it was some tag which I didn’t know existed — but Eat Your Feed did. When you allow the tool access to your Instagram, it also gains access to all of your data stored on the platform. It uses AI to scan your captions, locations, and tagged people to try to draw links to their recipe database. A few of these tags are displayed above your matches, which gives you a clue into how the algorithm made its selections. This explains why my photo of the ocean synched up to a mussels dish — both were tagged “Beach.” As to how they categorized both burgers and chicken & pasta soup as “Time” and “United States” is slightly less clear, however, though I suppose I was in America when I ate them?

Those who take the quiz instead of letting Instagram take the wheel have a bit more transparency into their recommendations. I took the 5-question quiz and was suggested recipes that were “Active” and “European” based on my answers. Which makes more sense than pairing cake and spinach soup together because both are purportedly “Swedish.”

One of the tool’s biggest issues lies with Knorr itself. All of the recipes must contain at least one of their ingredients, and since Knorr only makes soup stock cubes and powders, that limits the selection pretty severely.

I couldn’t find a way to save a recipe or add ingredients to an online shopping cart; the only option was to email myself a link to the recipe. In the future, it would be smart for Knorr to partner up with a shoppable recipes platform and a grocery delivery service like Allrecipes/AmazonFresh so they can actually deliver on those promises.

To give Eat Your Feed credit, the tool was gimmicky enough to suck me in in the first place. Plus, I did find myself clicking around other recipes on the site for a minute after I got my personalized meals. However, most of my suggested meals were so laughably off-base that I’m wouldn’t be inclined to make them at home, no matter how much they might remind me of that time I went to the beach two years ago.

So is the tool worth using? In short: no. It gives you almost no utility, but it’s still fun in the way that, say, taking on online quiz about Which Backstreet Boy Is Your Spirit Animal is fun: it’s pretty useless and probably inaccurate, but it’s a great way to waste a few minutes on the internet.

To promote Eat Your Feed, Knorr will open a pop-up restaurant at London’s Jones & Sons on April 11, where diners will be served meals matched to their Instagram feeds. I’ll be sad to miss my four-course meal of various soups and soup-like dishes, but maybe I’ll check in on the ‘gram. And then recreate them at all at home.

Six Trends We Might See In Food Tech In 2018

News publications making predictions for the coming year is as much a holiday tradition as eggnog, mistletoe and avoiding awkward political fights at the dinner table. As we put 2017 to bed, let’s take a look at trends that we might see in food tech in 2018. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is filled with topics we returned to time and time again throughout the year.

1. Alterna-Products Will Get More Mainstream. With growing concerns over how meat and dairy impact our planet, there are a ton of alternative products coming to mass market:pea-based burger patties that “bleed,” plant-based shrimp, and coconut milk ice cream, to name just a few. And with investment from accelerators, the whole alterna-space is just going to get better and cheaper.

2. Virtual Restaurants Will Pop Up Everywhere (and Nowhere). Data driven food delivery services such as UberEATS have convinced some real world restaurants to open up virtual ones. These delivery only offshoots can experiment with new cuisines and menu items without the cost of adding additional square footage.

3. Meal Kit Shakeup. The prepared meal kit delivery market is going through an evolution as one of its pioneers, Blue Apron, had a rough year, and more focused services are blossoming around specific markets such as kids, or just sending proteins. Then there are hardware players like Nomiku and Tovala looking to bring their full stack food solutions that can be paired with sous vide machines or smart ovens into more houses. Oh, and then there is Amazon, which may make same day customizable meal kits a thing this year.

4. The Further Instagrammification of Food. The meals you eat can no longer just be tasty, they also have to pop off the plate to impress all your Instagram followers. As Restaurant Business points out, look for “rainbow colors, vertical deserts, smoking cocktails” to be on the menu next year.

5. Artificial Intelligence and Robots Rise Up for Real. Robots are already flipping burgers and now even your face can help you order (both at CaliBurger in Pasadena, FWIW). But robots and artificial intelligence will become more mainstream throughout the food stack next year. From agriculture to reducing food waste, and from food aisles to food delivery, the immediate future is about to get way more high-tech.

6. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. No company had a bigger impact on the food space this year than Amazon. It bought Whole Foods, giving the e-commerce giant an instant, nationwide, physical presence to better facilitate grocery delivery. It partnered with AllRecipes for shoppable grocery lists and launched an in-home delivery service. And, oh by the way, it just sold tens of millions of Alexa devices this past holiday to make ordering that much easier. But the interesting thing won’t be what existing markets Jeff Bezos and company will exert its influence over, but entirely new categories Amazon will create (visual recognition in your garden!).

What do you think will be the big stories in 2018? Leave us a comment and share your thoughts below.

The Instagram Cocktail Community Is Changing the Business of Booze

Thanks to Instagram, cocktail culture is making a nation-wide comeback.

Ok, cocktails have never truly gone out of style, but a cocktail movement on the level of, say, craft beer or cold-brew coffee hasn’t really happened outside the major cities. And even there, you have to go to the bar and throw down at least $15 per drink.

But in recent years, the bars, mixology pros, and independent distilleries began posting pictures of brightly colored cocktails, the recipes for making them, and accouterments like diamond-shaped ice cubes, and it wasn’t long before the everyman jumped onboard the trend. The at-home mixologist, or drinkstagrammer, was born, and now there are tons of them online, sharing their creations with a growing community.

One of the biggest reasons people cite for this movement is that technology is helping to demystify the cocktail. Proper mixology requires not just good ingredients, but precise measurements, technique, and possibly a little chemistry. Before the internet, you either went to school for these things or saved cocktail drinking for nights out. Now you can learn online, and a lot of these drinkstagrammers are eager to show you how.

We’re also getting more alcohol delivered to our homes, which encourages at-home bartending. There are companies and stores that deliver the actual booze, and a handful of cocktail-kit services that provide ingredients. And all of this is considerably cheaper than going out for drinks on a regular basis.

It’s fun, too, as the wide range of Instagram accounts devoted to cocktails shows. Elliott Clark, who runs the very popular handle “apartment_bartender,” humorously describes himself as a “semi-decent home bartender” then proceeds to post intricate creations like a spiced-rum pomegranate sour. Elsewhere, Stir and Strain shows you how to turn things like Everclear into a delicacy. And Melissa Lapido, a self-professed “intoxicologist and garnish master,” makes sculptural drinks that would make for an interesting project to try any night of the week.

Drinkers and amateur mixologists aren’t the only ones to benefit from the online cocktail culture. For smaller distilleries, the movement is a way to get more visibility and recognition. The distilling industry is a notoriously challenging one, being both expensive highly regulated. If you’re not working with the budget of a major liquor company like Bacardi, it’s tough to get distribution, let alone a large following. Either by maintaining their own Instagram feed or appearing in recipes posted by others, these smaller brands and companies look to finally be having their day, too.

Emoji Menus

Could Emojis Really Change the Way We Order Our Food?

Fine-dining restaurant Dallas Fish Market recently held a $65-per-person dinner event, but it wasn’t the watermelon lobster or sesame-seed ice creams that were the main hit. It was a menu written entirely in emojis.

The upscale seafood joint got its inspiration when Nafees Alam, CEO of DRG Concepts, who owns the restaurant, came across an ice cream shop in Singapore with an emoji menu. Clearly it was a good idea to take the concept Stateside, as Dallas Fish Market sold out of its first “emoji dinner” event and has a second one coming up in about a week. The event menus have no text or photos, just emojis of the available food items. Guests are encouraged to correctly match the dish they’re eating to the corresponding emoji. There are bound to be surprises, since we don’t yet have icons for ingredients like saffron or truffle oil.

It sounds like an entertaining evening packed with laughs, but actually, there are some practical business reasons for incorporating emoji menus into a restaurant strategy.

For one, it’s a new way of using technology to interact with diners and create extra buzz. London restaurant The Little Yellow Door has regular emoji menu dinners, calling the concept “a cool way to engage with our audience.” Diners have to guess what’s on the menu before choosing a dish and ordering it via WhatsApp. Dallas Fish Market, meanwhile, noted an uptick in attention on social media thanks to all the photos and mentions guests posted on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And over in Bankok, Thailand, Gaggan has only emojis on its 20-plus-course menu. It’s also been voted “Asia’s Best Restaurant” for three straight years. Presumably, Gaggan’s creative take on Indian food has a lot to do with that award, but pairing unusual dishes with an unusual menu is a great example of how a simple technology like emojis can be used to further enhance the restaurant experience.

And you don’t have to serve a 22-course meal to do that. Domino’s Pizza is using emoji-based menus to streamline the order process, with its Domino’s AnyWare program. Save your basic info and preferences, text the pizza slice emoji to Domino’s, and wait for your pie to be delivered. Pizza Hut has tested something similar. Fooji, meanwhile, takes this idea step further: tweet the company a food emoji, and, using algorithms, they’ll pick a meal from a top-rated restaurant and have it delivered to you.

Of course this all sounds like a blast when you’re just talking about it, but emoji menus, for all their practical uses, also have some practical hurdles to jump in order to get more popular. How difficult a concept will this be for the local deli or noodle bar to implement? What happens if you order a salad and it comes unexpectedly doused in truffle oil? As Foodji founder Gregg Morton told Eater last year, “It really is food roulette.” And not everyone wants to play food roulette for lunch.

There’s also the matter of dietary restrictions. At present, anyone with health- or religious-based food restrictions would be hard-pressed to find something to eat via emoji menus. But that alone could create a whole new world of business, for restaurants, researchers, and app makers alike. I’m not yet convinced emoji-based menus will go mainstream anytime soon, but we’re likely to see them incorporated into some very creative food concepts in the near future.