AI Predicts What You Can Eat

Honeycomb.ai portal expedites finding suitable dishes at restaurants for people with dietary needs

Vancouver startup Honeycomb.ai alleviates the struggles of dining out for people with dietary needs, allergies, and lifestyle preferences. The typical ingredient-tetris bottleneck played between guest and server while dining out has amplified during COVID-19. Growth in online ordering and takeout has prompted customers with dietary needs to search online for dietary answers more than ever before.1 With over 52% of Americans following at least one diet, and less than 10% of restaurants labeling dietary information (typically not exhaustive), the information gap has never been wider.

Prompted by an Ulcerative Colitis health scare for co-founder Tamir Barzilai, Honeycomb.ai is set on eliminating the frustrating process of manual menu parsing by creating a portal for anyone with dietary needs to find suitable food to eat.

"After my personal diagnosis, I realized how many others struggle with finding food to eat due to a variety of reasons. The lack of ubiquitous dietary and ingredient transparency didn't make sense from both consumer and business perspectives," says Barzilai.

Honeycomb.ai is proud to be a pioneer in predicting dietary information and key ingredients for menu items. Backed by data science research, the results shown for any particular city and dietary combination are constantly improving as the algorithm learns from internal training processes and feedback from users and input from restaurants.

After testing with over 100,000 unique users in Western Canada, the Honeycomb.ai team is expanding globally. The first phase is live at https://honeycomb.ai/food, currently available for users in Canada, Australia, and the United States, and free to use. Honeycomb.ai supports Vegan, Vegetarian, Celiac, Gluten-free, Ketogenic, Paleo, Kosher, Halal, and Low-FODMAP diets, along with the 29 most common allergens and ingredients. A robust mobile experience is slated to be released shortly for iOS and Android.

Honeycomb.ai also supports those with more severe diets or allergies by displaying food preparation methods when available.

Barzilai states, "One of the most challenging aspects of accommodating dietary needs is the different levels of severity. Someone might simply dislike mushrooms, or they may be mildly intolerant to dairy, or they may have a severe anaphylactic reaction to shellfish by means of cross-contamination. We've built this sense of severity into our software."

While current predictive recommendations are still at their early stages, Honeycomb.ai expects the results to improve significantly over the coming months as more people begin using it across North America and Australia. Honeycomb.ai encourages people to use the portal to help expedite the training process.

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SOURCE: Honeycomb.ai Solutions Inc.