FoodKing: Japan’s Dentsu Experiments with Food-Finding iPhone App

Japanese ad giant Dentsu (TYO:4324) has released an iPhone application which aims to help you find nearby food and restaurants a little bit easier. It’s called FoodKing.

When you’re looking for a place to eat, the location-based app asks you to choose your category of food and then presents you with nearby options. The service is still just starting out, so unfortunately I received the ‘no results in your area’ message. Dentsu’s announcement notes:

Most [restaurant and food searches] are still centered around searching for restaurants in particular, but the newly released FoodKing enables searching for the particular food item of interest in your area, based on your location.

I confess this approach seems wrong to me, unless you are in a very densely packed urban area like central Tokyo. In that case, where choice abounds I can see the benefit of narrowing the parameters before showing a list of restaurant options.

Dentsu notes that this app was released globally, “so that users can communicate through food reviews throughout the world.” And I can’t really see it being useful anywhere but Tokyo unless it makes some adjustments. Thankfully, FoodKing is inviting some feedback and suggestions via their App Store page.

Update Sept 4: A representative elaborates that FoodKing is aiming to help the user find food, rather than restaurants:

Restaurant search is flawed. There are certain dishes that people wouldn’t fathom being included in menus of certain restaurants. For example, you might find the best Dim Sung at a Japanese restaurant, and not a Chinese restaurant. Maybe you can find the best burger at a Korean restaurant, and not the hamburger joint around the corner. Typical restaurant searches don’t produce results like those, unless somebody is nice enough to include them in the comments of the restaurants.

As for reviews, I found I could bring up a list of nearly places to review, so I FoodKing has pre-loaded some points of interest somehow. Update: I’m told this is using the FourSquare API.

While it’s far from perfect yet, I’m a big fan of any app that maps places to eat in my neighborhood. The food categories appear quite Japan-centric, so perhaps there’s an element of promoting local Japanese businesses to tourists here.

I tried to contact Dentsu earlier today to learn more about this, and I’ll let you know if I hear any reply. But for now, if you’d like to test out the app, you can find it here on the App Store. Depending on your location, your mileage may vary.