FoodRock Menus, a B2B2C startup founded in Moscow by a British expat with a Russian partner, has just launched its first products, testing the waters of the SaaS market for Russia’s restaurant industry.
Offered under a freemium model, the company’s “Live Menus” software enables restaurants to manage their online menus from a single place and then instantly publish it across the web, including on a restaurant’s website, its Facebook and VKontakte pages, and the FoodRock apps for end users.
Using the FoodRock control panel, a restaurant can add photos of its dishes, prices, nutritional information, and discount offers to its Live Menu.
FoodRock Menus has simultaneously launched a free iPhone app intended for end users. The app includes more than 1,200 restaurant locations in Moscow, and showcases a number of social and sharing features. The app has quickly gained popularity, grabbing the number seven spot in the Russian Appstore Food category this month.
“I’ve lived in Moscow for almost eight years and have seen too many good restaurants close down. I realized that every restaurant business faces a number of interrelated challenges which are hard to solve. These challenges include marketing, customer service, upselling, repeat business, customer engagement, and analytics. FoodRock Menus was founded to help restaurants with these interrelated challenges”, said FoodRock Menus’ CEO and founder Stavros Panayi in an exchange with East-West Digital News.
Panayi added that he did not get the inspiration for his startup from any existing Western model, and that he has no direct competitors in the Russian market. “There are, however, various online platforms in Russia which offer a single dining-related service, such as booking a reservation or placing a food order,” co-founder Alexander Egorov told EWDN. “These companies may compete with certain FoodRock Menus’ products or may even become potential partners.”
With over 11,000 restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg, FoodRock Menus is focusing on these two cities before expanding further afield. In terms of customer segmentation, FoodRock Menus is targeting a broad range of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, including both independent establishments and large chains.
Financing for FoodRock Menus is currently boot-strapped, but management has indicated that they are now considering raising a seed round from investors.
Panayi says that one of his startup’s main challenges is to ensure that end-users understand the FoodRock Menus brand. “The technical complexity of our various features – some of them being entirely new to users – means that it’s a constant challenge to translate that complexity into an effortless experience and intuitive interface for the end users.”
