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Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

26 points by hrayr ↗ HN
When a group of developers start meeting regularly for lunch, it's almost inevitable for them to create an app -- within days -- to answer a real question: What the heck should we eat today?

This happened to me on more than one occasion. Here's an old one from where I worked at long time ago: http://www.venarc.com/lunch/

I'm curious to see what other startups/groups have come up with. List your startup and a link to the lunch picker (if it's public).

67 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread
DigitalSea
The startup I contracted for didn't have an app. We would just take turns picking a place for everyone to eat at. One day I would pick a place, someone else would take us through some suspicious alley ways to a hidden Mexican place, etc.
pawangupta11
We experimented with a channel #Lunch on Slack, unfortunately it became a channel to share /giphy food
edmack
/giphy food is my FAVORITE slack usage!
jonbishop
We have a bot in Slack that randomly picks places from a list of nearby restaurants.
rtpg
same, the slackbot "random response" thing is a great 80% solution for so many things
simonw
When I worked at Yahoo UK back in 2006ish someone wrote an app to do this.
crawdog
Ah yes... The lunch gadget. At Plumtree Software it actually helped us sell a portal deal to Thomas Weisel Partners in the early 2000's. Good old ASP/VBScript.
stephenr
This sounds like a uniquely American thing to me. I've never heard of this concept anywhere except California.

Everywhere I've worked on-site, if people wanted to eat together they just did that weird thing people do and talk to one another.

fosk
I don't always feel like eating what other people want to eat, the problem here is finding every day some kind of food that everybody in the group wants to eat.

I always wanted to build an app that would track our preferences every day of the week, and then with machine learning predict what the team wants to eat on any given day.

stephenr
So go eat what you want and let them eat what they want for a day.

I really cannot believe this is a thing.

hrayr
I see you made this comment several times here, so let me try and explain...

Sometimes the office pays for group lunch, if you want something else, feel free to go, but prepare to pay for it yourself (This is rarely the reason to stick with a lunch group you don't enjoy).

When a group decides to go out to lunch, it's not because they all want to eat the same thing, it's because they enjoy it or recognize that it's good for office morale. Picking where to eat is a small inconvenience in this regard.

Most of the time, the problem is not too many choices, it's indecision. Everyone is hungry, they all want to eat something Good, but if you ask them what you want, they can't decide. If you put a CHOICE, most people will say eh, there must be something better. But almost everyone is content or doesn't really care what to eat if there's a solid decision in place. That's why these apps take the decision making out.

desas
One place in the UK I worked at had something similar-ish - a breakfast butty ordering system. You designed your breakfast butty and pressed order, it would generate a spreadsheet at the of the day, for emailing to the cob shop. Someone would pick them up on the way to work the next day, distribute them and take the money.
Kalium
Yeah... at my office this leads to endless amounts of bikeshedding, because the goal is consensus and everyone gets a veto. We would wind up at the same three spots every damn time.

I shortcut this by appointing myself lunch dictator.

ajkjk
That sounds annoying. It's not hard to not care where you eat on any particular day.
stephenr
I'd counter with it's even easier to just eat what you want, alone on a particular day.
Kalium
It works surprisingly well. It turns out most people are happy just to have the pointless bikeshedding stop.
Rafert
It's probably an extremely Dutch thing to do, but we have fresh bread delivered daily and sandwich filling in the fridge. On fridays some of us eat at various places near the office.
stephenr
Sounds like an amazing place, frankly.

One thing I miss about Australia (I live in Thailand now) is places to get good fresh bread/sandwiches etc., at short notice.

jasonkester
There's a delicate art to these negotiations if you want to end up going someplace good.

You can't just come out and say where you want to go, because it will get swatted down by everybody else who wants the Barbeque Joint or Sushi House or Rubio's Fish Tacos or Thai Garden. You have to let them wear each other down for a while until all the good options are off the table and everybody is resigning themselves to compromise on that lame soup place or Applebees or whatever.

Then you strike with Mama's Mexican Kitchen. Everybody will be so relieved that they don't have to eat another f'ng TGI Friday's meatloaf that they'll jump on the idea, even if they weren't in much of a Mexican mood 45 minutes ago when this stupid negotiation started.

stephenr
As I said. If you want sushi and no one else does, just go get fucking sushi and let them eat each other's toe jam if they want.

Why must you eat lunch with your coworkers every single day?

Joeri
We sell a room and services reservation software, and have set it up so you can order lunch and have it delivered to the office, from a windows desktop client, from a browser, from outlook or from a mobile app. Billing happens automatically through the integrated contracts and billing system. It's somewhat overkill, but we consider it a form of dogfooding. The company is mcs.fm
dofishwatchtv
We had the simplest "app" possible - cross platform, no Go or Rust or React. It was simply the newest member of the team had to go and collect the ordered lunches, organise the menus etc. Simple algo, simple implementation.
scrapcode
This guy knows his computering.
chrismorgan
“Hey, food intern! Go talk to people, ask them what they want; if they don’t react, tell ’em they’ll get dry bread and water on a rust-covered plate.”
A_COMPUTER
We use a custom supybot IRC plugin.
evanscottgray
We did this too, then we also tied in google maps to rank them by drive time.
kayman
I released an app recently.

http://lunch-picker.com

- Uses HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript (no server side code) - Material Design - Allows users to enter places where they normaly eat to select from

codewithcheese
Crashed the tab with 100% cpu when I tried to untick all the options (firefox)
ajuc
Yes, we had a part of our team learn salesforce API at the time, and we ordered dinner for most of the office every day, it was cumbersome to gather the orders and phone the few food seller every day, so the first app in salesforce they written was lunch ordering app. There were even stats with favorite dishes for everybody, and average money spent :)
evan_
We wrote a bot for our hipchat room that just picks from a list.
nness
This seems like a problem that doesn't require such an over-engineered solution. But I suppose over-engineering social arrangements is the underlying proposition of many Silicon Valley ventures...
nathancahill
That, and the not invented here syndrome.
stephenr
I'm not sure there's much to invent - unless the syndrome also covers basic things like human conversation.
dvirsky
I'm from Tel Aviv, and here we use a website (that's also a payed-for by the company credit card) to order our lunches.

Anyway they don't have an API, but we sniffed their AJAX stuff a bit and added some scripts to our Hubot that allow us to use Hipchat to order and get recommendations (including an I'm Feeling Lucky mode). We have company hackathons 3-4 times a year, and almost every hackathon had one project dedicated to hack the lunch ordering website.

BTW although they don't have an official API, some people here approached their team personally, and we got a bit of help in doing our unofficial hacks from them.

lucaspiller
How do you not get sick of being stuck in the office for 8+ hours a day? I like lunch as it gives me a break to go outside for a walk :)
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dvirsky
As I said, it's also a credit card, so we can go out with it as well, most restaurants in the city accept that card (it has a credit of about $12 a day payed for by the company, and if you use more than that it gets billed to your personal credit card. Most restaurants price their lunches to fit into this budget). Sadly there's only one restaurant within walking distance, and it's inside the same building.

But I do take walks outside regardless, often right after lunch, or sometimes I like to have walking meetings. Although to be honest, if I'm in the zone, I just code all day and forget about the outside world.

lucaspiller
Oh sorry, I misunderstood. I just thought you meant it was paid for by the company. That sounds pretty cool!
dvirsky
Yes, it is. The daily credit changes from company to company, of course, $12 is on the higher end, but not the highest I've heard of (plus you do pay part of it out of your own pocket, as it is taxed to some extent).

When I used to work in an area with a lot of tech companies, there was a daily ritual of walking together and picking between about a dozen restaurants, and you'd see tons of geeks doing the same thing every day around noon.

attilak
We (well I) started an instance of Hubot on our company slack. It checks most of the restaurants near the office (scraping) and announces the daily menu and prices on request. Then we just try to pick one. We are in Vienna (Austria), BeeOne.
egeozcan
I had created "The Lunch Planner". There's a barely-functional demo at:

http://providefoodfor.us/restaurants

It's on Bitbucket and I need to open-source it at some point. Built with Meteor. It was my "oh let's try this shiny new framework" project.

ggaughan
I found it painful to watch people collect everyone's orders and then phone them in and then try to work out what was in the delivery bags and who owed what. So I built https://fuseorder.com/

(just add an event for each meal. You can add your own places and menus as needed)

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bayonetz
Ours was to pick which restaurant we would actually go out to eat at that day. You'd think it would be easy to just pick a place, but no, everyday it was an ordeal.

To seed we it, picked a list of places and trimmed any that were vetoed by even a single person. Then with the remainder everybody got a a couple votes to cast for their favorites from the list. Then we made an actual physical Wheel of Fortune style wheel but with restaurants, each choice appearing as many times as it had been voted up in the seed list. It had about forty slots with the favorites appearing multiple times.

After making that, it was super fun to pick our lunch spot everyday by spinning this big wheel. It had the little plink plink spikes that the pointer brushed past and everything. Whoever had done a good deed that day got to be the "contestant", vying for our lunch fortunes.

Man, a novelty store should start selling customizable versions of these for offices...

bigbento
When I worked at OkCupid Labs, we normally just did daily lunch ad-hoc. However, we set up a little app that would organize a weekly lunch "date" where people would have a one-to-one with someone from a different team. I had some pretty interesting conversations come up from that, and if I were approaching this "problem", would start from there again.