How Augmented Reality Will Reshape the Food Industry

Augmented Reality is one of the trending technologies of today’s tech-savvy world. From mobile games to retail apps, business owners have managed to offer an exceptional user-experience to the customers through AR.

In fact, in the past four years, the number of AR-based mobile apps have significantly increased in the market. Business owners have understood the potential of AR in offering engaging customer experience and therefore have started to invest in AR mobile app development.

Like many other industries, AR is likely to benefit the food industry in many ways. Although we are yet to see AR based dining apps, they have a huge potential in providing customers with an interactive dining experience.

The truth is if you own a food business, AR is your solution to stand out in the market. In this blog post, we are going to explain how Augmented Reality is going to impact the food industry and why you should hire an AR app development company to develop an AR-based dining app for your food business.

What is Augmented Reality?

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Augmented Reality, you are in for a great surprise. AR is a technology using which we can overlay virtual objects on the real-life footage recorded by the device’s camera.

It means that AR doesn’t take customers away from the real world but still provides an exceptional customer experience by overlaying virtual objects. Pokemon GO is one of the perfect examples of an AR-based mobile app where the Pokemon is virtually placed on the actual map.

IKEA has also integrated Augmented Reality in its mobile app so that customers can make better shopping decisions. Using the app one can virtually place IKEA’s products into their living room, office, bedroom, etc. and figure out whether a certain piece of furniture looks good or not.

From the above two examples, it is clear that Augmented Reality has the potential to take the user experience one step further. However, how AR is going to impact the food industry is still a big question. In order to understand the impact of AR on the food industry, we must take a look at how the food industry works.

Three Pillars of Food Industry

Any food business, be it a multi-billion dollar restaurant chain or the food truck standing outside your office, relies on three major pillars. These pillars are:

• Customer Experience

• The Food Products

• Human Resources

Customer Experience

It is worth noting that customer-experience should be the first priority of every food business. Of course, you need to focus on preparing quality food but the way you represent this food in front of the customers will decide the fate of your food business.

Why people prefer going to fine restaurants to have dinner? The answer is pretty simple, due to enhanced customer experience. These restaurants care about the customers and thereby put efforts in providing an exceptional customer experience.

Now, when we talk about enhancing the customer experience, AR can prove to be extremely beneficial. How? Well, customers never know how a certain food item will look before it’s placed on their table. A physical menu doesn’t give the power to visualize the food items.

However, with AR coming into the picture, one can virtually take a look at the presentation of a dish prior to ordering it. This visualization will take you one step further in nurturing a healthy relationship with your customers.

Moreover, with an AR-based food app, there’s no need to have a  physical menu at all. The customers can simply access the menu through the app itself and virtually check the appearance of a certain food item.

Another way to enhance the customer experience through AR is to allow customers to check the reviews of a specific dish. As soon as the customer would click on a certain food item, all the previous reviews will pop up on the screen, allowing him/her to pick the best dish to enjoy the perfect dinner.

With Augmented Reality (AR), you can overlay additional information on your mobile app, making the entire dining session more interactive. Basically, enhancing the customer experience is the key to skyrocket the growth of your food business and AR is the way to do it. Building an AR-based food app will not only help you enhance the customer experience but also put your food business ahead of your competitors.

Food Products

You cannot win the game simply by enhancing the customer experience, you need to make sure that your dishes are finger-licking as well. No matter how advanced customer-experience you offer through your AR-based app if your food items are not good. So, before anything, you need to make sure that your service is top-notch.

Human Resources

In the food business, it is important to train interns so that they don’t make any mistakes during their career. You can’t run a restaurant if you don’t have well-trained workers who know how to handle different situation. To make your workers highly professional, training them is highly imperative.

This is when AR can prove to be extremely beneficial. With Augmented Reality, you can make your training sessions more interactive and make the interns learn more efficiently.

Simulating training programs through an AR-based app will make the entire training session fun and it would be easier to deliver knowledge to the students. Whether you are teaching to a class of 10 students or giving individual training sessions, an AR-based training session would be much better and knowledge imparting.

When it comes to training intern chefs, AR can help you educate students about different parts of a dish and the dedicated process to cook it. For instance, if you are teaching someone how to precisely cut steak, you can simulate the entire process through an AR-based mobile app.

This will help the students to get familiar with the different angles of the steak and how they can cut it layer by layer without damaging even a single portion. This is how AR can benefit the human resources department of any food business.

In fact, many hotel/restaurant owners have already started to integrate AR & VR into their training sessions to make them more interactive and fun. If you have been struggling to train your students using the traditional training methods, make sure to invest in AR app development.

How to Build an AR-Based Mobile App for Your Food Business?

Now, that you know how an AR-based mobile app can benefit your business, let’s take a look at the process of developing such an app for your food business. To develop an AR-based mobile app, you need to hire AR app developers who have expertise in integrating Augmented Reality into a mobile application to enhance the overall functionality.

Developing an AR-based mobile app is not an easy task. It requires expertise in AR app development and therefore it is imperative to hire a team of professional AR app developers.

While hiring an AR app development company, though, there are a couple of factors that you need to remember. These factors will help you screen different companies and hire the one that best suits your business requirements.

Here’s how you can screen different AR app development companies to hire the best team of AR app developers who can build an AR mobile app for your food business.

Take a Look at Developer’s Profile

Like the majority of business owners, you are going to start your search for AR app developers on one of the freelance websites. Upwork is the biggest platform where you can find a plethora of AR app developers.

The best part about hiring developers from freelance websites is that it helps you compare different team of developers by looking at their profile itself. Most of the developers have shared their expertise in their profile and you can easily examine whether the app development company is capable of meeting your business requirements or not.

Compare the profiles of different AR app developers and narrow down your list to the 3-4 best developers who have the potential to build an AR app for your food business. It is also important to identify whether you want to hire freelance developers or a professional app development company.

While freelance developers offer affordable development rates, the work of a professional app development company is way more promising. This is why it is always advised to choose app development agencies over freelance developers.

Once you have a list of 3-4 app development companies, move towards the next step.

Compare

This is when you need to scrutinize precisely to cherry-pick the best app development company for your AR based restaurant app. Compare your list on the basis of services being offered and development rates.

It is always a good strategy to hire companies which have developed similar apps in the past. Reason being, the developers will already know what challenges they might experience during the development process and the right methods to tackle them.

So, if any app development company has built an AR food app in the past, it is worth hiring it. This will make it easier for the developers to develop the app.

Go Through Company Portfolio

The company portfolio is a great place to figure out whether the developers can transform your idea into a fully-functional mobile app. Top app development companies have usually listed their project details under the portfolio tab. Take a look at this portfolio and determine if you can hire the company for your app or not.

It is also important to take a look at the client reviews. This will tell you whether the development team was able to achieve their previous client’s goals or not. If you are finding AR app developers on Upwork, take a look at the company’s rating.

You can also ask the company officials to share the contact details of their previous clients. Get in touch with these clients and ask them about their experience with the app development company.

Conclusion

The truth is AR has the potential to take your food business to the next level. Not only can you offer exceptional customer experience through an AR-based mobile app, but you can also get ahead of your competitors and become a well-renowned brand in the food industry.

However, it is important that your AR based food app offers advanced functionality. There’s no point in developing an app if it fails to captivate the target customers. Therefore, make sure to hire the most suitable team of AR app developers who can meet your business goals.