Big Data and Food – How could you not love this? Food Genius is a Chicago-based outfit that delivers Big Data insights to those in the food industry. How exactly? Food Genius tracks and analyzes data from 22 million items on restaurant menus across the country. This means things like pricing, social, menu options, and reviews – these are all factors that can singularly or collectively make or break restaurant earnings, distributor earnings, and suppliers all the way along the chain. By focusing on consumer behaviors and the power of Big Data, Food Genius is able to supply quick access to critical food business data to people that build menus, order supplies, consumer packaged goods companies (known as CPG), and restaurants of all kinds. The result is high quality data that is very granular and is seeing widespread valuable use across the industry.  That means better menus, better options, better pricing, better ingredients and more.

In a briefing with Justin Massa, Food Genius CEO, he discussed the incredible power and value that this business to business product delivers. The product is known as Reports, and it is completely built in Amazon’s EC2 environment. The flexibility of Amazon’s cloud allows them to not only have quality enterprise-grade performance, but also scale on demand to build out as demands and operations grow. There is so much information within the Reports console, and it has all been developed for rapid consumption (no pun intended) – meaning the interface is critical to the usability of the actual product. From there you will find individual items on a menu, pricing, dish options, regional data, cooking methods and so much more. There is a clear effort at all times to keep the interface simple, but have all the data points readily available. Say you were to try and put together a menu and you knew you wanted a chicken item, you could use this tool to easily see that in a particular region, at this current season, chicken may be a profitable item. Being on the west coast, there may be a health-conscious trend that says you should bake that item for the highest success. You may also find the right particular mix of garnishes and seasonings that add up to make the best plate available at the price you want it to be at. This way the restaurant can come up with seasonal or monthly specials that make sense and will sell well. That’s the power of what this unleashes.

Old methods would mean leveraging decades old market research techniques that just couldn’t be predictive and could take months to deliver. The market is huge, by some numbers over $600 billion is spent on dining yearly in this country, and another $500 billion in groceries. By and large, older existing processes take a while to deliver and evolve to consumer tastes, however with Food Genius’ Reports in action, the market can respond and deliver a lot quicker to your grocery store and restaurants that you enjoy. That whole thing just made me hungry, but note this – The next time you sit down for a feast at your local restaurant, Food Genius might just be working behind the scenes.

Probably Could Use Food Genius