Zest launches a restaurant discovery app powered by where people actually eat
A new startup aims to reinvent how people discover their next favorite place to dine and, one day, perhaps more. Zest, a newly launched restaurant
A new startup aims to reinvent how people discover their next favorite place to dine and, one day, perhaps more. Zest, a newly launched restaurant discovery app, uses a combination of transaction data and AI to make personalized restaurant recommendations based on where people actually go to eat, drink, or grab a coffee. Founded in November 2024, Zest currently has $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from Alexis Ohanian at 776 and Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures. It has been in beta testing since nearly day one, expanding from friends and family to larger groups over time. Now, the app has launched to the public, allowing anyone to track their dining outings and get recommendations. In a matter of weeks, Zest has attracted over 100,000 visits post-launch and is growing. Image Credits:Zest While a number of apps allow people to make dining wishlists or curate favorite spots, Zestâs advantage is that its recommendations are based on real-world data. To use Zest, youâll link your credit card to the app, and it will import all the restaurants youâve visited to create a personal dining map that others can follow. (It doesnât track fast-casual or fast food, to reduce the clutter.) As the app learns where you dine and what you like, it gets smarter, making personalized recommendations of what to try next.
You can also follow friends or creator-curated profiles to get other suggestions of where to eat, either in your own city or when traveling, if you choose. Image Credits:Zest Your credit card data is imported into Zest via the financial services company Plaid, trusted by banks and other fintech and budgeting apps. This allows the app to access your credit card transactions, import only those in the food and drink categories for its map, and ditch the rest. The idea is not as crazy as it seems. Venmo also leverages peopleâs desire to share where they shop and dine with others, turning spending into a social network of sorts. And in an earlier era of the web, a startup called Blippy infamously tried to turn a feed of your purchases into a recommendation network of sorts. Where Blippy and others like it went wrong is that they stopped at data-sharing alone, instead of building a network based on the data that improved their understanding of user interests over time. In addition, they were likely too early, as consumer sentiment towards data-sharing has improved over time, as they saw where it could add value in services like Appleâs Find My Friends, Snap Map, and others. Image Credits:Zest âOur approach with Zest, by doing it via verified dining spend, we actually think that we surface more places that are actually interesting.
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