The Revitalization of the Restaurant Menu

Restaurant menus could soon be getting a major upgrade thanks to social media technology. Social media has already become a major part of restaurant business. People will often go to a restaurant and take a Snapchat of their food or post a picture of their food on Instagram. If you are a restaurant and people are posting pictures of your food on social media, you are getting free marketing to all of the persons followers. I think the customers benefit from this too, a restaurant is going to want to consistently give their customers quality food so they will recommend it to their friends.

A company called Kabaq is looking to change up the formula again using alternative reality and social media platfroms like Snapchat to show the customers food items on the menu before they order. An article on Digital Trends explains the burger chain Bareburger will be one of the first restaurants to implement this new technology. Pictures are taken of each dish on a menu from a bunch of different angles to create a 3D model of the food. Using an app like Snapchat or the Facebook camera you can display an image of the dish on your phone in front of you and look at it from any direction to see if it is something you want to eat.

I think this would be a great way to promote the consistent quality of food being brought to the customers. If they have an augmented reality image that looks like food does in commercials and the food you bring out does not look as good as the image then the restaurant runs some risk of bad press. The customer could take a picture of the augmented reality food next to the actual food they received and the marketing they could be benefiting from is now hurting their business. The inverse of this is also true, if the actual food looks like the augmented reality image, the customer could post the same picture and the restaurant would receive positive marketing.

I think this is a really cool opportunity for restaurants, as of right now most of the food items on menus are described in words with a few items that can be seen as images. Plus, if people are trying to be adventurous and try new food, if they don't know what something is on the menu but they can see a picture of it they may be more likely to try the new food.