Restaurant discovery app Zomato, which expanded into the food ordering domain a couple of months ago, has today announced a new open-source API to score restaurants, named Foodie Index. As the name implies, this index will be used by Zomato to score restaurants for their quality, taking different factors into consideration.
Zomato has also announced, that this Foodie Index, starting today, will be available to developers for free, as an API, so as to integrate these scores within their app. The first app to feature this score will be that of Common Floor, one of India’s largest online real-estate listing platform. CommonFloor has made the Foodie Index available across India in their Locality Map section to help users identify ideal neighbourhoods based on great places to eat at around them.
The restaurant discovery platform is eyeing developers with apps in the field of real-estate and travel domain, enabling them to provide information on the quality of dining options in a particular neighbourhood by leveraging Zomato’s location-based Foodie Index. Building on Zomato’s exhaustive restaurant data which spans across 22 countries, the Foodie Index aims to facilitate the decision-making process of people looking for apartments or hotels with great dining experiences just a short walk away.
Satyajeet Singh, VP Products & Marketing, Zomato said,
Users will now be able to zero in on apartments and hotels in neighbourhoods where they can enjoy the best dining experiences a city has to offer. With the Foodie Index API, we’re making Zomato’s rich content easily accessible and restaurant discovery incredibly easy.
Zomato, post its mega acquisition spree, has been intensely focussing towards getting into other food-related domains, in a bid to become the one-stop solution for all your food cravings.
Its most recent venture, was the testing of a pilot version of its upcoming food ordering service, which it is currently testing in New Delhi. This pilot launch was followed by a tie-up with Uber,wherein you can get a cab ride to your favourite restaurant, if reserved via Zomato, directly through the app.
Then, a couple of months back, Zomato acquired U.S.-based table reservation platform, NexTable in order to integrate that facility into a new feature called the Zomato Book. Post acquisition, the service was first launched in Australia, UAE and India.
A week before its NexTable acquisition, Zomato announced the acquisition of MaplePOS, a cloud-based Point of Sale product for restaurants. As an immediate result of the acquisition, the product was renamed to ZomatoBase.
With Foodie Index, Zomato will be trying to address the quality issue which users have, by rating a restaurant on various scales. Moreover, making the foodie Index available as an API, will probably be a first with respect to the Indian startup ecosystem. Availability of app APIs is more of a western trend, and Zomato’s move to make Foodie Index API open-source, is an indication of its ambitions to be recognised as a global brand.
