The moniker ‘Airbnb for Food’ is a quick, self-evident moniker: instead of heading off to a restaurant to dine and/or nosh, there are websites out there that encourage you to head to someone’s house to dine and/or nosh.
There are a lot of websites out there seeking to provide a platform for that. But how are these sites different from each other? What are their unique, differentiating features? Their strength of strengths?
Roberto Scaccia, SupperShare’s CEO, suggested their strength was in “removing the technological clutter and connecting hosts and guests in a more meaningful way.”
Jay Savsani of Meal Sharing liked the site’s “‘make what you make’ concept. Make something that you make on a typical night. You don’t have to be a chef or create over-the-top meals. The Meal Sharing team wants to foster an environment of sharing.”
“We don’t think of MealTango as a food company,” Saket Khanna – co-founder of Meal Tango – told me. “We assess all hosts for food quality and hygiene of course, but as important for us: we assess their warmth and hospitality too. And yes, we’ve actually rejected hosts based on this criteria!”
He was asked to elaborate.
“Well, we can’t rank warmth, as it is subjective. But we can ensure our hosts actually love to entertain. There’s a form all our ‘food critics’ fill out after a demo meal with a prospective host. The intention is that we can assess whether the hosts really do enjoy having visitors over! If money making or other motives take precedence, we aren’t keen on that type of host. As an example, a couple (evidently on the verge of divorce) wanted to be hosts on MealTango. A few minutes into the demo meal, the food critic realized this was a war zone, and not the type of host we would want on MealTango. We took the decision to not include them on the site. Saying no to interested customers is tough for a startup. Yet we believe it’s the quality of our community that matters as much (more, even) than the quantity, and that a warm welcome in a home in a foreign land — that’s an experience for travelers that can’t be beat.”
Walter Dabbicco – a co-founder and director of marketing at Gnammo – gave a much more simple answer.
“We’re Italian. We know how to do it. We’ve the experience of years and years of good cooking and hospitality. And this in an enormous advantage. I repeat: we know how to do it. But at the same time, this is the hardest market to prove our idea. An error in hospitality culture or in kitchen here can’t be forgiven.”
Given that he ‘knew how to do it’ – that there was ‘years and years of good cooking and hospitality’ that served as training and background – he was asked as to the best food experience he had ever had in Italy, as there surely had to be a source to inspire such belief and such confidence beyond the fact that it was his job to have belief and be confident.
“While I was walking in the old center of my city, Bari,” he said, “I saw a lady who was preparing ‘orecchiette,’ a typical kind of homemade pasta that only a few people know how to prepare. It’s necessary to make a strange movement [with the] knife, and a fast thumb touch. So, while she was preparing orecchiette on her door, a couple of tourists (German, I think) stopped and looked at her. She explained them the preparation with the international language of gesture and let them sit and try. I stopped here and helped them with the Italian. She later asked us to stop and eat in her house, and, yes, the best orecchiette and the best conversation of my life with the two German guys, the lady, her husband and me.”
Olivier Desmoulin of Super Marmite said that “our positioning is really different. These websites you mentioned are more focused on creating great experiences around food to connect tourists with local people. It’s about discovering people through food, and it mainly targets tourists. On Super Marmite, the main purpose is not about inviting tourists to eat at home, but more about providing an alternative to the day to day fast-food market. I would say that our purpose is more to compete with McDonald’s in providing healthy and affordable housemade takeaway food. We create a platform where people with cooking skills can connect with people and offices in their neighborhood to provide meals and expand the richness of the food offer of the local area.
“This results in a lower pricing, and a more casual offer, because we are aiming to have people using it everyday for lunch or dinner. Also, the food on super marmite is generally for takeaway, whereas on the other websites, users generally eat at the cook’s home.”
Naama Shefi – the Marketing Director of EatWith – told me that “most emerging marketplaces have low barriers to entry due to the fact that no proprietary knowledge nor hardcore technology are needed to build the product. In the end, it all boils down to timing and execution. As one of the pioneers of social dining” – and as eyebrow-raisingly above the fray as that sounds, there was at least one other person at another company I spoke to who pretty much acknowledged this, too – “we are happy to see a growing number of new companies entering the space, as it validates the market need.”
Evelyne White – co-founder of Bookalokal – said over the phone that ‘Airbnb for Food’ websites “don’t really have that much insight into each other, business models and each others’s future plans. All we can go on is everybody’s websites. Each is born in a particular location, and once they succeed in their location, it’s: can they replicate? It needs scale to work.”
This kind of site, she said, “is not Twitter. This is not something that can explode. It’s based on people who love this and do a good job. Building a community that does both well takes time.”
What struck her in doing market research as she was starting Bookalokal was that “everybody was interested in being a guest, but not everybody was interested in being a host because they were freaked out by the idea of people coming into their houses,” and that partly influenced the direction of the site. If EatWith and BonAppetour are focused on the travel perspective, she said, then Bookalokal was focused on the host perspective. “75% of our users are local, and that’s attractive to the tourist community as well.”
“I read articles that said, ‘I tried to do the whole trip on the sharing economy – everything would go smoothly except for the dining experience.’ It’s a micro-event. All the time. You’re dealing with real people with real lives all the time.”
Despite that difficulty, she says, she’s seen results. “There was an Indian couple hosting in Brussels that hosted a French family, and the French family responded by inviting them to their farmhouse in France. I thought people would meet on Bookalokal, become friends, and then not use the site again, but that hasn’t been the case.” People check it regularly, she said, and the conversation moved to discussing costs and scalability before being interrupted by a passing train.
Cédric Giorgi – co-founder and CEO of Cookening – said that “Cookening was among the first [sites intent on focusing on “gathering people around a same table at home to share a meal”] to start out of France. Cookening is different from other platforms in the sense that our product has been completely designed to match the experience our guests and hosts want to have. We do focus on people more than food. Because in the end, what you’ll remember from a meal is the people you’ve been with, not the food.
“Having said that, it remains one truth: we’re all very similar, and the main objective is to evangelize a lot around this concept, and to be the first one to scale globally.”
