Venture Strategy for Food Genius

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Message Venture Strategy Fueled by a mission to “help everyone love what they eat,” the Chicago-based food-tech startup Food Genius uses a complex algorithm to track more than 16 million restaurant menu items and classify consumers’ dining-out behaviors. Food Genius Reports, the consumer and industry trends dashboard launching in the fall of 2012, was an idea hatched during Food Genius’ time as IDEO’s first Startup-in-Residence. By aggregating food-related info from a variety of web and mobile apps, Food Genius Reports provides customers in the food industry with actionable food-trend data and app developers with access to the Internet’s largest database of restaurants and dishes. With consumers spending over $600 billion a year on dining out, Food Genius’ real-time data service is poised to become a game-changer in the food industry, which currently relies on 40-year old market research techniques to predict food trends. IDEO first met the 1-year-old startup during weekly mentoring sessions at Excelerate Labs’ 2011 Summer Program, an intensive accelerator for startups. At that time, Food Genius was a technology-focused product-development company with a consumer-facing, food-discovery mobile app. The experience working with IDEO’s venturing team encouraged Food Genius to focus on their team’s expertise and true value to the industry and reposition their core offer from app developer to API and data provider—a “pivot” in venturing terms. After Excelerate, IDEO invited Food Genius to become our first Startup-in-Residence and work on building out its new platform. The Food Genius team co-located in our Chicago studio for 14 weeks, living and breathing IDEO culture. Together, we collaborated on experimental deep-dive design sessions covering such topics as qualitative research methods, designing with data, business and technological development strategies, and product road mapping. We even prototyped a viral marketing experience called “Curry Crawl” to test the usability of the new API. “When we first met IDEO, we expected them to solve our design issues,” says Justin Massa, Food Genius CEO. “What we learned during our residency, however, was how to use human-centered design thinking to become a customer-centered company and sustainably solve our business problems. The experience was life changing.” Post-residency, IDEO sent “Designers-in-Residence” to Food Genius’ new offices to work on a 4-week UI design sprint in preparation for Reports’ market launch. We look forward to an ongoing partnership with Food Genius as the startup continues to grow its offer and become a dominant insights provider for the food industry. http://www.ideo.com/work/venture-strategy

Fueled by a mission to “help everyone love what they eat,” the Chicago-based food-tech startup Food Genius uses a complex algorithm to track more than 16 million restaurant menu items and classify consumers’ dining-out behaviors. Food Genius Reports, the consumer and industry trends dashboard launching in the fall of 2012, was an idea hatched during Food Genius’ time as IDEO’s first Startup-in-Residence. By aggregating food-related info from a variety of web and mobile apps, Food Genius Reports provides customers in the food industry with actionable food-trend data and app developers with access to the Internet’s largest database of restaurants and dishes. With consumers spending over $600 billion a year on dining out, Food Genius’ real-time data service is poised to become a game-changer in the food industry, which currently relies on 40-year old market research techniques to predict food trends.

IDEO first met the 1-year-old startup during weekly mentoring sessions at Excelerate Labs’ 2011 Summer Program, an intensive accelerator for startups. At that time, Food Genius was a technology-focused product-development company with a consumer-facing, food-discovery mobile app. The experience working with IDEO’s venturing team encouraged Food Genius to focus on their team’s expertise and true value to the industry and reposition their core offer from app developer to API and data provider—a “pivot” in venturing terms.

After Excelerate, IDEO invited Food Genius to become our first Startup-in-Residence and work on building out its new platform. The Food Genius team co-located in our Chicago studio for 14 weeks, living and breathing IDEO culture. Together, we collaborated on experimental deep-dive design sessions covering such topics as qualitative research methods, designing with data, business and technological development strategies, and product road mapping. We even prototyped a viral marketing experience called “Curry Crawl” to test the usability of the new API.

“When we first met IDEO, we expected them to solve our design issues,” says Justin Massa, Food Genius CEO. “What we learned during our residency, however, was how to use human-centered design thinking to become a customer-centered company and sustainably solve our business problems. The experience was life changing.”

Post-residency, IDEO sent “Designers-in-Residence” to Food Genius’ new offices to work on a 4-week UI design sprint in preparation for Reports’ market launch. We look forward to an ongoing partnership with Food Genius as the startup continues to grow its offer and become a dominant insights provider for the food industry.