Many of us struggle to make a choice while ordering food online. The sheer variety of food and the number of restaurants overwhelm us so much that we end up ordering the same old dish from the same old restaurant.
This is what HOGR wants to change. The Bengaluru-based food discovery platform wants people to approach food with curiosity and explore cuisines with confidence.
Choice doesn’t have to be a paradox, believes Jugul Thachery, CEO of HOGR.
“India wants to eat only butter chicken, masala dosa, and biryani, as if there is nothing else. But only because we don’t know, and this is our staple,” he remarks.
Thachery co-founded HOGR last year with Harish Harshan, who is the CTO at the startup. Prior to starting HOGR, Thachery worked at Masalabox, a content-driven food commerce platform. The stint here helped him understand the intricacies of food commerce.
As he began to conceptualise HOGR, Thachery realised that many restaurants and cuisines remain undiscovered on food delivery platforms, and people usually opt for familiar restaurants and dishes.
This is something Thachery had experienced himself.
Every Sunday morning, he and his daughter would wake up and decide to have an English breakfast. However, after spending 30 minutes browsing through various cafes online, they would get tired and hungry and order masala dosa from Adyar Ananda Bhavan, their go-to restaurant.
This continued for a while, until his daughter said no more. Eventually, Thachery asked a friend to recommend a good place for baked beans and bacon, and finally they found what they were looking for.
This is precisely what HOGR offers: recommendations from friends and family through a mobile app.
The startup helps people cut through the clutter online and make well-informed decisions based on reviews and recommendations from people they trust—be it a friend, a food expert, or someone with similar tastes and interests.
The HOGR platform helps people discover restaurants their friends have been to and connect with people with similar culinary interests. It also helps restaurant owners understand customer preferences and target a captive audience on the app.
HOGR has partnered with over 250 restaurants in Bengaluru, Kochi and Chennai and collated food and restaurant recommendations from users across the country.
Follow friends and foodies
Users of HOGR can login to the app and sync up contacts on their phones to find friends and family. They can also search for food bloggers, influencers and fellow foodies and follow them for their recommendations and reviews.
HOGR App
Posts on the app range from details of different aspects of a dish to what is good and what could be better in a particular restaurant. Users can also post short videos with ‘must try’ recommendations.
Apart from discovering restaurants and dishes, users can scan QR codes and order from restaurant’s menus. They can also book tables and place takeaway orders.
Match taste profiles
HOGR creates a taste profile for every user on its platform. This is based on their conscious choices and explicit behaviour—including what they eat, when they eat, and whom they eat with.
It also makes note of users’ subconscious behaviour, which includes the subtle, underlying factors that can surface while scrolling through social media or while consuming content. These are habitual patterns that shape food preferences beyond conscious decisions.
The user profiles are created using generative AI.
“HOGR’s proprietary AI continuously gathers user data from interactions like dish choices and content engagement to create detailed taste profiles,” says Thachery.
Deep learning models identify patterns and preferences and build people’s food persona. They are then matched with users who share their tastes. The app displays a percentage match based on users’ profiles, allowing them to follow people with similar likes and dislikes.
“This peer-to-peer or friend-based recommendation system offers fairly accurate food suggestions tailored to individual preferences. By following others with matching taste profiles, users can create a community centred around shared culinary interests,” says Thachery.
This fosters a trusted social ecosystem for personalised recommendations, he adds.
Revenue model
While restaurants can partner with HOGR for free, the startup charges them a fee of 3% of the total bill value for large table bookings made through its platform.
“This fee is charged only when customers discover the restaurant through HOGR and visit it to dine,” says Thachery.
Users also have to pay a fee of Rs 10 for booking a table in advance through the app.
Other elements
Users get HOGR coins for signing up, referrals, visiting the app every day, and posting reviews and recommendations. They also get coins for ordering and paying through the app.
The coins can be spent on games on the platform or on any transaction on the app. Users can also use the coins to buy tickets for HOGR Xplore’s culinary experiences such as food walks, food tours, and cooking classes. There are also vouchers to be won and redeemed at HOGR’s partner restaurants.
The app also has an AI chat feature.
Building a community
The company raised seed funding of Rs 10 crore in December last year from Curefoods, a foodtech company. The funds were used for developing Hogr’s technology and building a community.
HOGR’s platform has around 3 lakh active users. The startup aims to grow this to 10 lakh by the end of this financial year, focusing on Bengaluru.
While peer-to-peer food discovery is a growing market in the country with players such as UrbanPiper, Explorex and LimeTray, it is not easy to build a loyal community of consumers.
It is especially challenging to find what makes people come back to the app, admits Thachery. Convincing restaurants to come aboard is another challenge, he adds.
In the next few versions of the app, HOGR plans to add more features to declutter the whole user experience.
