If you think that mobile app are only limited to the gaming industry, we would encourage you to give it another thought. The fame and admiration of mobile apps have forced the majority of businesses to launch their apps. The food and restaurant industry has started using mobile apps to enhance the customer experience. There are a lot of restaurant app ideas. Some food chains use these apps as a marketing channel while others introduce ease for their customers through their mobile apps.
These apps mostly serve as a way for businesses to optimize procedures, fasten processes, gain profits and build a customized marketing strategy. If you check statistics related to mobile apps, you would find out that 45% of people love to order food via apps. This increasing demand has been serving as fuel for the market to grow. The mobile app market for the food industry is expected to grow by 20% by the end of 2025. It is time to invest in a food app and for that exact reason, this blog highlights the top app ideas for restaurants.
Mobile App Ideas for Restaurants to Develop
In case the statistics have made you wonder whether to have an app or not, we have an answer for you. YES! It has become necessary for your food chain to launch a mobile app to avoid extinction. Where these mobile apps open multiple new doors of opportunities for businesses, they offer ease and comfort to the users as well.
If you have used mobile apps for food, which we are sure you have, you must have seen different features. Every food chain adopts and drops certain features based on its target audience, goals to achieve, business culture, and other such elements. Are you ready to launch an app for your business but are confused about what features to add? If you whispered yes, we have some great app ideas for restaurants planned for you.
Order and Pay App
There can be times when your customers want to order food for their loved ones and surprise them. They would not want the person receiving it to pay for the order. Is the app you are building powerful enough to tackle such a situation? Believe it or not, customers love to have options and we are not talking about food options.
Since the fintech industry has evolved much, your customers have gotten out of the habit to carry cash. This has forced many businesses to introduce multiple ways for customers to pay apart from cash. Some of the most popular fintech payment methods include PayPal, Payoneer, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and CHIRPIFY. Apart from these popular ones, there can be other locally introduced methods as well.
Your customers love to pay with their credit cards and debit card. Some of them even use PayPal or Payoneer to transfer money for what they buy. It would be a good idea to provide your users with all the famous payment methods to choose from. You will need to do some research on these payment integrations, see what options are available in the market already, and then finalize integrations to include in your app.
Having your developers integrate payment methods finalized, you will have an app connecting various restaurants and allowing the customers to order and pay from the comfort of their homes. Introducing multiple popular payment options is even better. This will empower your customers to choose the payment option of their choice. Moreover, you will gain a better reputation in the industry for being tech-friendly. This will help you towards gaining more customers and giving a satisfactory experience to the existing customers.
Order and Pickup Apps
Do you think everyone always loves to have food delivered to them? We doubt that they always do. At times, customers are too tired to cook food once they get home or have some uninvited guests showing up in a few minutes. It is tiring to cook food but they can always pick it up while on their way home. This helps them ensure that they are receiving the right order and nothing gets messed up on the way.
For such customers, you can develop an app that offers them the option of pickup service only. This service can be made available with the help of a button placed right next to the order option and customers will be able to select the time of pickup as well. The customers can easily click on this option and prepare to have their food collected. This app idea for restaurants saves the time and money that they spend on having the order delivered to the given address.
Moreover, another great feature you can offer is the freedom to pre-order food for a later date. The customer should be able to enter a suitable pickup date and time. Giving this feature will save the restaurant from the stress of giving hot food to the customer. The customer can also skip putting the food in the oven and have it hot.
Make Your Menu Talk for Itself
No one likes to look at something boring. Food is supposed to give happiness and instill excitement in people. A menu is the first thing someone willing to order food will look and that makes it an extremely important element of your app. A menu with a boring or sad vibe is a huge turn-off for the customer. It would not be wrong to say that it can either win you customers or make you lose even the ones you have. It would be a great idea to include Machine Learning in your app to do its magic with the menu. It can read the usage patterns of the user and present some options from the menu.
However, at times, people can keep staring at the menu and would fail to decide what to order. That is a problem you can solve for your customers and develop an app around this issue. What about introducing artificial intelligence here? You can inquire about the mood of the user and his likes. Based on the answers, you can filter out the menu and present the top 5 options. Don’t forget to give your filtered menu an exciting vibe. Add a pinch of creativity and probably introduce AI with a cute figure or animation to make your customer’s experience interactive and interesting.
You can even divide your menu into multiple sections based on famous moods. Under the sections, you can include starters, main courses, soups, salads, desserts, drinks, and deals. Don’t forget to save the choices of your customers to give them better suggestions in the future. Creativity is a constant process so don’t give up and keep being creative to let your customers decide what they love the best. This app idea for your restaurant can do wonders by facilitating the customers even more.
Restaurant Location Finder
The days of remembering places and routes to them are long gone. Humans have developed their brains to focus on more important things and leave directions on mobile applications. This is one of the prime reasons behind the success of Google maps. Given this fact, it is evident that people either have to continuously look at their phone to have a map guide them to the place or make dozens of calls to the help center of the restaurant.
The situation gets even worse when the customer wants to travel to multiple stores or restaurants on the same day. This means that there is an unattended market of customers you might want to tap in. Why not make an app that is always there to help a customer find the location of his favorite restaurant? Such an app has a huge potential and can cater to the needs of a lot of users.
Your app can have a separate section where the customer can find locations of all the famous stores. Another section designed can give the user locations of all the restaurants and stores in a decided radius. Moreover, the user will be enabled to store locations of all the stores of choice along with addresses. These locations must be connected with Google Maps to make navigating easy for your customers.
A lot of restaurant apps you can find today must be using this feature, but we bet no single app must be providing locations of all the restaurants. This app idea for restaurants does not only help your customers find the physical presence of their favorite restaurant and save them time, but it can guide people and help them not get lost. You should better start working on this secret idea before anyone else does.
Review Changes in the Game
Let’s be frank, reviews can either make or break the reputation of your restaurant. The power of negative reviews is 10 times more than the power of a positive review. One single negative review is capable of making at least 10 of your potential customers form a negative opinion about you without even trying your services. This is why customers find it extremely important to read reviews of a restaurant before going there.
However, customers find themselves struggling to read reviews of a restaurant. This happens because no platform consolidates the reviews from all the famous review platforms and shows them to the customers. A customer has to go through the social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to gather reviews from previous customers. Sometimes, they have to read reviews on Google maps as well.
You can launch an app that makes use of AI and ML to gather reviews of all the customers from all the review platforms and show them to the users. You can add tags to the platforms you get reviews from to add to the credibility of the review. The user must be able to filter reviews based on various elements like the date, likes, year, and others. It would also be a great idea to have your users vote for a review as helpful or not helpful to make it easy for you to decide on the credibility of the review.
You must design and develop your app to incorporate reviews from customers as well. You can either add a slideshow of reviews from social media accounts along with all the images. Having the images imported into your app will help your users trust you and the reviews on your app. You can have a feature empowering your customers to drop reviews right in the app as well instead of going to different platforms. It would be best if you can add a review feature for every item on the menus of the hosted restaurants.
This will enable your customers to see the items liked and disliked by other customers in the past. The customers will feel more connected to other customers and comfortable with placing an order. You can also expect the sales of the particular restaurants to increase within a few weeks so you, probably charge them for hosting their restaurant on your app as well.
Table Booking Apps
Just like the app idea for restaurants we shared previously, you can experiment with bringing all the restaurants on the same platform with another idea. There are restaurants in the market that require their customers to book a table for themselves before they walk in. For such restaurants, a different phone number is allocated just for the customers to call and make a reservation. However, it is not easy to have the call connected on these numbers for a long queue of customers is always calling. This can annoy customers and probably make a lot of them move to other restaurants instead. What should you do to avoid it?
You can develop an app that brings all of the pre-booking restaurants on a single platform and give their customers an option to view the available tables to proceed with booking. The users must be given the option to filter the tables of a restaurant under the day and time of their choice. You can also give the users the option to filter all of the restaurants based on the day and time of their choice as well.
This user must be shown all the available tables for different times of the day in a month by default. This app will be enabling the customers to view all the available tables, hold the table for a day and make the payment to confirm their reservation. This will help your customers to cut on the time wasted waiting to have their call connected and reserve at their ease.
Moreover, you can also add an option of decoration or having a big hall booked for bigger celebrations like birthdays and weddings. These sections of the reservation can include different decoration themes and colors for the users to select. You can also charge an upfront payment to make the booking, ask the number of expected guests, present a customized menu, add pictures, and much more.
Deals and Offers Shortcut
Customers love to have an amazing food experience. However, there is another thing they love more than that. They are crazy about discounts and offers for amazing food. The restaurants that keep offering various discounts and deals to their customers earn far more than the restaurants that don’t as deals and discounts even make those people place orders who normally would never.
However, the problem is that restaurants use different mediums to post about their discounts and deals. Sometimes, they use their social media, and other times they have pamphlets printed, display them on big screens and wait for them to reach their customers. Some restaurants even have taken the game one level up by only displaying discounts and deals their menu on certain apps. This makes it difficult for the customers to keep a tab on all the platforms to avail of discounts and enjoy deals.
You can develop a mobile app that gathers information about all the nearby restaurants and their deals and discounts hosted on various platforms. This will make it easier for these offers to reach your customers. You can also introduce filters for your users to filter the restaurants and their deals based on the cuisine, last date to avail of the offer, location, and similar options. This can help restaurants increase the reach of their deals by hosting their restaurant on your app. You can show the stats of your app to the restaurants and make bundles for them to benefit from giving their deals and discounts directly to your app. These are some crazy app ideas for restaurants that will result in not only regular but loyal customers too.
A Quick Wrap Up
Looking at the market trend one can easily notice that it has become essential for restaurants to introduce mobile apps for their customers. It is even more important for businesses to include flawless and good features in their apps. However, adding more features is not enough to answer all the needs of their customers. The customers of today have more needs and want solutions to the problems they are facing. There are multiple app ideas for restaurants one can come up with when it comes to the food industry. We have shared some ideas for you to start developing on and have your app launched to win over the untapped market.
If you have any trouble deciding which features you should include and exclude or are confused about the innovative features, you can leave your worries to us. Origami Studios is famous for developing and delivering top-notch mobile applications. Our applications are known for their flawless execution, amazing interface, friendly features, and living up to expectations. To have your mobile app developed, get in touch with us today!