IIT Kharagpur alumni develop social network for foodies

KOLKATA: This festive season connect with fellow foodies, spread the word about an eatery and discover exciting places to grab a bite -- courtesy Eatable, a social network for food lovers created by IIT Kharagpur alumni.

The platform not only helps food lovers and tourists find the best places to eat at a particular location, it also aids businesses to widen their reach.

Three alumni from IIT Kharagpur -- Mainak Sarkar from the Electrical Engineering Department, and Pritam Khan and Sumit Agarwal, from the Computer Science and Engineering Department -- developed this social network-cum-utility platform for foodies anywhere in India accessible both on mobile and desktop.

The fourth co-founder is Abhijit Ghosh, a Civil Engineering final year student from IIEST Shibpur.

"It is a social network just like Facebook but exclusively for food lovers where they can connect with other fellow foodies and also their favourite eateries," Mainak Sarkar, Co-founder & CEO, Eatable, told IANS.

"The idea came from problems faced by travellers at new or unknown places about the availability of choice of food, locations and quality."

Users can connect with fellow foodies and share their experiences, recommend their favourite eating places to their friends and followers, and help add a place to the network's database.

"A person can add a place, they had food at and liked, to the platform via the 'Discovery' post option which adds that place to our database. How this helps is by letting people know about the places that are not usually available on any other platform," Sarkar said.

How does it help businesses?

"It allows eateries (restaurants, cafes, bars, pubs and others) from any location with internet access to join the platform and connect with their customers and keep them engaged and updated about all their activities in real time," Sarkar said.

"Users can follow and recommend the places they visited and liked. When a user recommends, a notification is sent out to all their followers about it and it remains saved. So this recommendation helps businesses by spreading word-of-mouth publicity."

Sarkar said eateries can edit and post content easily by themselves unlike other platforms where they need to mail these platforms about offers and updates and it takes a lot of time before it is reflected on those platforms. 

"When these eateries post updates, their followers are notified about these updates in real time. This allows eateries to have a much higher reach and since Eatable is exclusive to food, chances of content getting lost is very low," he added.