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Hospitality Operations Blog

This app will help towards the improvement of the hospitality, catering and restaurant business. I’ve looked at several different apps that have a similar aim, to help people with their cooking and take them step-by-step through new recipes. My app will be open for both private use at home, but also available to larger restaurants and the catering industry. For example, for new chefs in the kitchen. It will be efficient and time saving, it will also cater to cultural differences and at the same time, it won’t take away your ability to be creative. The first part of the business process is to collect information. With my app, you will be able to choose what you want to cook based on several factors, e.g. what food you have in your fridge, whether you’re on a diet, what mood you are in, the occasion (wedding, casual dinner with friends…), what season it is, whether or not you’re on a budget and so on.

The app will then allow you to enter your information, what’s in your fridge, or whether you are having a bad day, it will process the information you have entered and create your own personal recipe.

If you don’t have the food that is required to make the dish you want, the app is installed with an online groceries shop. You can choose which recipe you want to make, what food you do have, and whatever you don’t have at home, you can order online and it will be delivered to your front door within the hour.

Once you have the ingredients you need to make your meal, the app will take you through the cooking process step by step using descriptive instructions, photos and videos. Once the meal has been prepared, you can upload a photo of your meal for future customers and write reviews on how efficient and helpful the process was.

The app is designed to help people with certain needs and requirements, whatever those may be, it will be able to cater to everyone’s personal needs. The app will be able available on most products including the iPad and iPhone, it will also be available to all android users, for all those apple technophobes out there. There are already hundreds of cooking apps in the industry at the moment, some successful and other not, but the concept of the app is to combine ideas from the apps that have achieved and succeeded in what they wanted to create a super app, but with a few new extras that haven’t been done yet. There will be a free version of the app but then an upgraded version, which would cost £2.99.

Once the app is downloaded, you have to fill in a survey. This will include; age, budget, nationality, diet requirement and whether you’re choosing to cook for yourself personally or if you’re catering for a business. The app will then automatically track your location, it does this so if you need to order food from the app, you don’t need to enter your personal details, it will instantly know where to deliver your goods. Using the time on your smartphone or tablet, it finds out which season you are currently in, do find all the best produce from that given time.

The apps main target customers are trainee chefs. Everyone knows that working in the kitchen is a stressful time, and sometimes there isn’t enough time for the head chef to go through each step with you. The app is there to help you through this. Once you have filled in your survey, you can choose which recipes you would like to cook. These can be pre-loaded recipes that come with the app, or ones that have been created and saved. This is where is comes in handy in the kitchen. The head chef in the kitchen can upload all their recipes onto the app and save it for future reference and for other employees to work through. They can also create videos and upload them onto it. The reason this is so useful in a busy kitchen is because its more efficient. The chef training the new employees can’t go through each step with each new employee; it would be too time consuming. The app is a breakthrough for a more efficient, timesaving way to train new chefs.

The app will be able to cater for all different needs; this will include cultural differences and language barriers. There will be translation buttons for technical terms, and explanations, as well as a video tutorial for basic skills. For example, knife skills. There will be videos of how to dice onions, or how to julienne a carrot.

Everyone knows how annoying it is when you are using an app for cooking, and you are mid-way through and suddenly you have to scroll down to move on to the next steps. You end up getting your phone sticky and covering with your ingredients. This new app will use the phone or tablets microphone to take in your instructions by just using command and speaking to it. You can ask it to move to a certain step, or to define a technological word you don’t understand. Once again the app is improving time management, as you now don’t have to wash your hands every time you want to go to your phone.

Sometimes, when you make a recipe following the ingredients step by step, you reach the end, and you feel like you could have improved something or added something to the recipe. Now you can add new ingredients or change certain methods and it will be saved on your app for future reference. This comes in handy when working in a busy kitchen, as chefs can automatically save their changed recipes instead of informing everyone in the kitchen that they have changed.

The app offers plenty of other helpful gadgets that will help make the cooking process simpler and less time-consuming. One of these is a built in timer, you can set yourself a time you want to be finished by and devote a certain amount of time for each section, therefore finishing on time and efficiently. Again when working in the restaurant, you can easily enter the amount of customers eating with food allergies or intolerances, and the app will alter your recipe for you, changing the amount of ingredients you need and creating substitutions for new ones.

Cooking apps are improving the methods of cooking, and will continue to do so in the future. Because of this app, you will no longer how to go out and buy expensive cooking books, one for each cuisine, course or dietary requirement, you now have it all on one app. This cooking app will save you money and time, and all you need to do is download an app.

For the idea to become possible, the use of technology comes into play. As quoted earlier in the blog, food will be delivered to homes or kitchens where and when it is needed, without entering an address; this is possible because of location-based services. Location-based services is a computer program, which includes specific controls for location. “Detecting and tracking the position of a mobile user has become one of the important subjects in many mobile applications” (Chatterjee, S. Design of energy-efficient location-based cloud services using cheap sensors). Within recent years, location based services have become vital with the increasing demand for smartphones. It can be used for entertainment, personal or work use, object search and even health related issues. Examples of location based services include requesting local businesses, including restaurants or shops, navigating to an address, recommending certain social events in your area (Timeout, London), or even helping you recover lost items (find my iPhone). “The users of LBS in the world are expected to grow from 96 million in 2009 to almost 800 million by the end of 2012 while revenue generated by consumer LBS is forecast to reach $13.5 billion in 2015” (Gartner, 2012).

In addition to the food being delivered using location based services, it will also use radio-frequency identification (RFID). This uses wireless radio frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data. In doing so, it can automatically track and identify objects. This will come in use when food is dispatched and sent to address, to check its shipping process, but also to recover lost items. RFID is continuing to develop today, “as RFID tags are location-sensitive, they can be used to enhance personal safety in general. In this context, not only have schools begun deploying RFID to keep track of pupils, but public leisure parks are using the technology to attract families concerned for the personal safety of their children and elderly relatives” (Srivastava, A. Radio frequency identification: ubiquity for humanity).

Another possible technology could in augmented reality. Augmented reality can be direct, indirect or live. It’s a view or physical, real-world environment enhanced by computer generated sensory input, it includes sound, video and graphics (Duan, L. Wide area registration on camera phones for mobile augmented reality applications). AR was first used for military, industrial and medical applications. Smartphones and tablets contain processors, display, sensors and input devices often including a camera, GPS and compass (Shen, R. A system for visualizing sound source using augmented reality). This technology would be used for the video tutorials teaching methods of cooking. It would also be helpful for those speaking a foreign language; using the images to help them step-by-step (Hahn J. Mobile augmented reality applications for library services).

Augmented Reality (AR) is one technology that dramatically shifts the location and timing of education and training (Lee, K. Augmented Reality in Education and Training). Wireless mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablet PCs, and other electronic innovations, are increasingly ushering AR into the mobile space where applications offer a great deal of promise, especially in education and training (Johnson, et al. (2010)). In corporate venues, AR is a collaborative, skill-learning, explainable, and guidable tool for workers, managers, and customers (Liarokapis, et al. (2004)).

In addition to the previous technologies, another possibility could include the recommender system. Its role is to predict the rating or preference on a product for a user based on their history. (Kim, Y. Text recommender system using user's usage patterns). Using this technology, the app can therefore be recommended for keen chefs or for managers looking to improve the training in their kitchen. On another hand, it could also be used to recommend certain dishes similar to the ones that uses have previously enjoyed using the apps rating system. A good example of a company who already use the recommender system are amazon. Amazon’s website is structured with an information page for each book, giving details of the text and purchase information. The ‘Customers who Bought’ feature is found on the information page for each book in their catalog. It is in fact two separate recommendation lists. The first recommends books frequently purchased by customers who purchased the selected book. The second recommends authors whose books are frequently purchased by customers who purchased works by the author of the selected book (Schafer, J. Recommender Systems in E-Commerce). In relation the app, it is an easy way to find recipes you will enjoy, but also for new customers to discover the app.

 

References

-       Chatterjee, S. (2013), Design of energy-efficient location-based cloud services using cheap sensors, Vol. 9, Issue 2

-       Gartner, (2012)

-       Srivastava, A. (2007), Radio frequency identification: ubiquity for humanity, Vol. 9, Issue 1

-       Anand, A. (2013), Business value of RFID-enabled healthcare transformation projects, Vol. 19, Issue 1

-       Hahn J. (2012), Mobile augmented reality applications for library services, Vol.113, Issue 9/10

-       Johnson, et al. (2010)

-       Lee, K. (2012), Augmented Reality in Education and Training, Vol. 56, Issue 2

-       Liarokapis, et al. (2004)

-       Schafer, J. (1998), Recommender Systems in E-Commerce

-       Kim, Y. (2011), Text recommender system using user's usage patterns), Vol. 111, Issue 2

-       Duan, L. (2013), Wide area registration on camera phones for mobile augmented reality applications, Vol. 33, Issue 3

-       Shen, R. (2013), A system for visualizing sound source using augmented reality, Vol.9, Issue, 3

Appendix

-IMPD Flow Chart

-Recommender Systems Diagram