Foodpanda Adds a Recommendations Feature for Food Discovery in India

Foodpanda on Wednesday announced that its app has added a food discovery feature in the form of restaurant recommendations when ordering. When you open the app, you don't just see the full list of places delivering in your locality but instead, two tabs - Recommended and All Restaurants. The latter is, as the name implies, all the restaurants in your locality, but the Recommended tab showcases different categories of restaurants near you, such as Express delivery (restaurants that will deliver in 45 minutes or your money back), Top Rated restaurants, Best Offers, and Popular near you. Some other categories include Snacks and Healthy Bites, while you could also browse by cuisine.

Restaurants you frequently order from will also show up here, and the app supports searching for a specific dish and seeing the restaurants that have it available. "While redesigning the app, we always take into consideration our customer’s feedback and requirement," said Saurabh Kochhar, CEO, Foodpanda India. "With the recent enhancements in the app, we have moved closer to our goal of reorders within 30 seconds. The revamped app needs minimal navigation, and provides an easy and seamless experience to our customers."

"The future releases will aim to make the food ordering experience more seamless and personalised using data analytics in the background," added Rajat Shikhar, Chief Product Officer, Foodpanda India.

Of course, these features are pretty standard on other food ordering apps by now. Swiggy has offered categories such as Offers Near You, Super Fast Delivery, Trending, New, and so on, for quite some time. Its search has also allowed you to search for restaurants and dishes both. Zomato Order has a quick-search navigation letting you search for cuisines, and a scroll showing deals nearby. Search allows you to look up dishes and restaurants, and filters such as delivery time, cost for one, and minimum order have been around for long as well. Even Uber Eats offers similar features on search, and its home screen shows lists such as New, Popular, Under 30 minutes, and so on.

With an ad-campaign starring Shah Rukh Khan, the announcement of its own logistics service Dash, and a Hygiene rating to assure users of quality, Foodpanda seems to be making up for some of the ground lost to the competition, and the app update is a step in the right direction.