Latest Partnerships in the Food+Tech Space

Partnerships can instantly boost a companies reach or offerings. In the food+tech space, we’re seeing a number of relevant couplings.

OpenMenu and FoodTracker

OpenMenu’s partnership with FoodTracker gives diners quick access to nutrition information.

Digitizing menus and helping restaurants to syndicate them online, from their own website to Facebook, is a competitive market with a lot of potential. OpenMenu makes the following value proposition to restaurants: “one menu, maintained in one location, connected everywhere.” In this space, they compete with companies like SinglePlatform and Ordr.in.

FoodTracker by HealthNexxus is (more appropriately, was) a separate service that restaurants use to give diners access to the nutrition information behind each menu item using QR codes. Now, clients of OpenMenu can easily incorporate FoodTracker with their accounts and give diners access to the ingredients behind each dish and its nutrition info.

The OpenMenu partnership with FoodTracker helps to boost some of the OpenMenu functionality and gives FoodTracker greater reach.

How important is it to you to know the nutrition information of a menu item?

Foodspotting and GrubHub

Foodspotting’s partnership with GrubHub gives its users one-click access to placing an order for delivery.

Foodspotting, “the best foods and where to find them,” is a dish-discovery application that’s also somewhat of a poster child for incorporating 3^rd party services. It already included Yelp reviews, SinglePlatform (restaurant menus), OpenTable (restaurant reservations), Foursquare and Instagram. The latest is its partnership with GrubHub, a food ordering service.

Food ordering is an attractive space (seen those Seamless advertisements in your city?) and some portion of the 3 million people that have downloaded the Foodspotting app, according to the company, are now a click away from using GrubHub as their ordering service.

Food Genius and GrubHub / CHD Expert

Last month, Food Genius announced partnerships with GrubHub, an online food delivery platform, and CHD Expert, a provider of data for foodservice sales and marketing. Food Genius will be leveraging these data partnerships to launch Food Genius Reports, a restaurant trends dashboard for the food industry.

Food Genius also announced that they had raised $1.2 million in venture financing.

Feastly and Relay Foods

Feastly organizes social dinners and Relay Foods is an online grocer. The partnership between the two, announced a few weeks ago, encourages chefs on the Feastly platform to order their ingredients via Relay Foods while the latter gets access to Feastly chefs and users.

For background, Feastly “connects hungry eaters with passionate cooks,” allowing home cooks to market and host meals in their homes. Virginia-based Relay Foods is like Fresh Direct but with a greater focus on local and sustainable producers and recently raised some funds to expand in Mid-Atlantic states.

Foursquare and OpenTable

On the “desktop” version of Foursquare, users have been able to make reservations directly from the website through an integration with OpenTable. Last Month, the company rolled out this functionality on their mobile application.

For Foursquare users, it makes the service that much more of an effective tool for planning outings.

Trippy and Forkly

Trippy is a service for “collect[ing] travel ideas and plan[ning] great trips” and Forkly is a mobile application that helps users find “what’s good” at bars and restaurants. The two teamed up earlier this year so Trippy users can identify dishes to try while traveling and Forkly users can take their palates on the road.

Which one of these partnerships do you think is best? Seeing any other good ones out there?