Hungry Zypher!

Affordability for Customers and Sustainability for restaurants. Delicious Meals from local neighborhood restaurants at affordable prices!

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Inspiration

In the face of the recent pandemic crisis, hospitality industry has been impacted the most, We are working on a platform (Hungry Zypher) giving small businesses an opportunity to return to business and have a resilient and sustainable business model leveraging subscription business model

There is a huge demand for daily affordable meals for individuals for all individuals & age groups. Consumers / Meal Subscribers will be able to order food from multiple local restaurants in their city / locality for an agreed meal price (30% cheaper in comparison regular menu prices)

Restaurants will have a guaranteed, predictable income based from the subscribers and therefore will be able to provide meals at a lower cost (30-35% discount), there is no overhead costs for restaurants in terms of rent, waiters, space etc. as the program primarily focuses on food deliveries & restaurants will be in the same locality / neighborhood, therefore food can be delivered in minutes.

Our platform will help restaurants become more sustainable and resilient by evolving their business model and offering affordable food to Customers on a subscription plan. (i.e. 12 or more meals per month at a fixed price as desired by the customer)

What it does

Our Food tech platform will use restaurants data from from Yelp/Others and categorize restaurant data based on their pricing (Single $, vs. Multiple $$), We will then create partnerships with the restaurants, where they can be part of a program from which they will get guaranteed orders from local customers & deliveries in the local neighborhood. In return for the commitment of predictable income and guaranteed orders restaurants will have to provide the food at an approximate of 30-40% discount and they will be able afford this as there is no overhead costs such as food wastage, rents, waiters, cutlery, utilities etc. therefore reducing the the total cost of ownership

Customer will subscribe to a monthly plan; based on their choice and will get the option to choose from number of meals that they would like to order per month and to the number of courses they would like in their meal. We have options from 1 course, 3 course or up to 5 course meals.

A minimum commit of number of meals (12/24/36), specific neighborhood will be required for the month where customers will pay up front and will get unique codes from our platform which they can order from any restaurant in the same neighborhood at the discounted price.

As we will have pre subscribed customers from a specific neighborhood, locality or city and also the inventory of all the restaurants in that neighborhood categorized by Pricing tier, we will be able to match and show the customer options from eligible restaurants.

We will also ask for Customers cuisine preferences, days of order at the time of sign up / subscription, with all of the above data points, we will be able to provide a predictable orders to the restaurants where they will be able to plan their strategy accordingly and avoid food / time wastage.

Our Design / platform has considered Restaurant owners, Consumer, Community & the platform.

How we built it

Hungry Zypher is still in the early phase and design is being worked upon, We currently have wire frames, working prototypes and are working to Customer and Restaurant Owners Psychographics, We are working on User Journeys, Partnerships terms and conditions, and Customer Personas. We are trying to understand the difference of market and variants on multiple restaurant types etc.

We will build profitable partnership with Yelp or other current ordering platforms, We will use these order platforms to fulfill the orders / deliveries, our platform will only focus on Meal plan subscription, partnership with restaurants with a focus on suitability & resiliency. Therefore creating a customer / closed set of restaurants relationship in the neighborhood.

We will build the platform on react native UI with, payment gateway integration, encryption & security to facilitate online payments, generate coupon codes which would be sent to customers over mobile app and email, it should be useable on desktop browsers, tablets and mobile apps.

Challenges we ran into

During our research, we recognized that there are restaurants that were forced to close due to pandemic and new entrepreneurs that are interested, however did have the upfront investment, therefore we came up with an option of a "Community kitchen" which is also our USP.

For new restaurants or food entrepreneurs, we will have an option of joining a community kitchen, where multiple restaurants will use common kitchen space to cook with shared utensils, ingredients and pay rent / utilities only for a counter that they utilize rather than owned equipment. Community Kitchens will be in moveable containers which can be moved in case of natural disasters like epidemic, wildfire, lock downs or political unrests in the city / neighborhood.

This will also help Restaurants with low or minimum capital become more resilient and sustainable. We also realized that we will have costs to build and sustain the platform, for which we will show localized ads to customers about restaurants that would like to promote their concept / meals.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During feedback sessions from consumers, the receptiveness to try this concept is welcoming, Restaurant Owners are also thrilled as they can experiment, and have a predicable income as it can help them plan better and avoid unnecessary costs.

We are proud that we are able to create value for Restaurant, Consumers and the Community.

What we learned

We learnt that the impact for Restaurant owners will be enormous as currently they don't have consistent daily orders which results in food wastage and their investments are not truly realized. This will be an additional channel to their current streams of revenue which will help them sustain for a longer time and become resilient for any challenges as they will be able to reduce expenses. It will be an opportunity for all for all types of establishments from food trucks to established restaurants.

What's next for Hungry Zypher

Once we have a working model in one city / neighborhood, We will able to scale this concept into multiple cities and across geographies. We will not only focus on existing restaurants, we will also simultaneously work on providing an opportunity for Community kitchens where Chefs from different backgrounds could work together.

This concept can also be extended to any kind of services like Salons, landscaping & Hospitality. The food tech platform will be designed to accommodate establishments and consumer from different service industries and minimal cost to get onboarded.

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