Background

For small, local restaurants, reputation is vital to survival. With the rise of food review sites and social media, up to 90% of diners are influenced by online reviews. Customer reviews have replaced professional food critics in determining reputation, so chefs and restaurant owners are always reading food review sites and diner comments to find out how to please their customers. But diners all have different tastes and opinions. And with over 1 billion reviews already online and more being shared every day, it's very hard for chefs to know which opinions are more important to their business and which are not. As a provider of professional restaurant ingredients, Unilever Food Solutions saw a dual opportunity: 1. To help chefs and restaurant owners spot the issues that matter and get the right solutions 2. In the process, gain insight into restaurant needs, raising UFS’s own engagement with these customers.

Describe the creative idea

We created a mobile app that would turn the noise of diner data into knowledge chefs and restaurant owners could easily understand and act on – Food Pulse, the smart restaurant advisor. Scanning the internet for publicly available data on everything diners are sharing about a restaurant, Food Pulse sorts through and analyses all the different data points and distils its finding for chefs to more easily track their restaurant’s reputation and quickly spot the issues that really matter. Food Pulse also provides the right solutions – tips and recommendations from UFS – to the specific issues spotted, positioning UFS as a solution provider and not just a product provider. And by helping chefs understand the data about their restaurants better, UFS could also learn more about diner and restaurant needs to better engage these same chefs and restaurant owners.

Describe the strategy

To turn the noise of diner data into knowledge. Driven by diner data, Food Pulse tracks a restaurant’s reputation to provide chefs and restaurant owners insights into their diner needs while giving UFS insights to a restaurant’s needs, driving the opportunity for UFS to raise engagements in quality and frequency and improve its relationship beyond a product-based one. Our audience are chefs and owners of small, local restaurants (chains and family-owned) in Singapore and major metros in Malaysia. They work hard to strike a successful balance of food quality, service and price while maintaining profit. They value reputation and use smartphones to read customer ratings/reviews trying to find helpful insights… but they’re drowning in data. As chefs are generally not social media marketing or digitally savvy, a mobile app that could analyse the social media and review data to provide insights into their diner needs was a great solution.

Describe the execution

More than just aggregating ratings, Food Pulse uses a combination of natural language processing, photo recognition, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to turn the many ways diners are rating, reviewing and sharing online into meaning information. Requiring 18 months to plan, design, build and test, Food Pulse analyses millions of data points to help chefs identify trending topics and issues more easily. Features: The Pulse Score – a single score that rises and falls based on a restaurant’s total ratings, reviews, photos, comments and even diner sentiments, number of reviews and recency. Track competitor’s Pulse Scores and compare by restaurant, location or cuisine. Learn what diners like and dislike via trending keywords and topics ranked by popularity and sentiment. Data-driven recommendations to improve on food, menu, service and venue matched to trending issues. The Pulse Report – A weekly 1-minute update on changes in their score, competitors and trending topics.

List the results

Launched on April 15, Food Pulse has scanned over 29,266,575 data points (ratings, reviews, comments, photos and sentiments), analyzing data for 222,713 restaurants in Singapore and Malaysia: • 5,418,942 Ratings • 5,988,733 Reviews • 3,220,186 Comments • 705,856 Photos • 13,932,857 Sentiments Engaging chefs and restaurant owners: Food Pulse is delivering far superior results compared to target benchmarks online and on-ground sales visits, reporting a 202% increase in interactions with the brand and up to 700% more time spent with UFS branded content compared to its .com platform. Helping chefs find out what diners want and the solutions to make things better: Over 121,833 topics, trends and issues were identified, and matched with 104,886 professional recommendations from UFS on how to keep diners coming back for more. Chefs and restaurant owners rated it a 5 out of 5 rating on the App Store and Google Play supported by positive testimonials.