Crowd Fed

Food Talk Plus
Food Talk India, the much vaunted online food community established by Shuchir Suri and Anjali Batra, looks to take on restaurant aggregator Zomato with its Food Talk Plus initiative. A dish-discovery app, it focuses on specific dishes in a particular geography rather than the restaurants there. “So, if you go to a restaurant and enjoy a particular dish, you’re encouraged to upload a picture of it and where you had it. The app is GPS-based so that whatever location you’re in and you’re craving a specific food, you just need to open the app and key in what you’re hungry for; based on our user’s ratings the app will suggest the best places to get your particular craving satisfied,” says Suri. Apart from providing you a dish-discovery, the app will soon post events (usually curated by Food Talk India), secret suppers and special discounts at various pubs and grubs.

BetterButter
With a mission of becoming “the Google for food recipes in India”, BetterButter wants recipes from you. Founded in August by former marketing and finance professionals, and full-time foodies, Niaz Laiq and Sukhmani Bedi, the app is a natural progression of their website, BetterButter.in, which is a repository of recipes. “We got the idea when we were searching online for recipes of a dish, say butter chicken, and found a huge variety of sites with different recipes by different chefs, using different measurements. There was no central place from where you could choose the recipe which best suited you,” says Laiq. This realisation led to the development of BetterButter, which currently acts as an aggregator for 5,000 recipes by over 700 contributors, ranging from celebrity chefs to restaurants to home cooks and food enthusiasts. “We welcome all takes on different dishes, from generic Indian to regional specialities,” says Bedi. The app
includes features like suggesting dishes based on the ingredients in your kitchen as well as predicts recipes based on your previous searches.