If you haven’t tried the food photo social network app Foodspotting, you’re missing out. The company announced today that it has raised $3 million in venture capital to fund further international expansion and to build what it calls “Pandora for food.”
I just started using Foodspotting a few weeks ago and have fallen in love with it. From discovering places to eat to seeing what a menu looks like on a plate before I order to reading it like a hyper-local foodie newspaper, there are lots of different ways to use the app. The six-person company will celebrate its one-year anniversary this weekend and has a compelling vision for the future.
The company has monetized its free service to date by paid partnerships with services like Travel Channel, Zagat and others who seek place-based, community-vetted food photography for their websites and mobile apps. Company founder Alexa Andrzejewski told ReadWriteWeb this morning that its long-term plan is for the service to offer a platform for “location targetted food advertising.”
See also: The Evolution of Foodspotting & its Plans to Expand Beyond Food
Foodspotting was inspired by the co-founders efforts to explore new foods while traveling internationally and the company has already begun to find success outside the US. There have already been more than 10,000 dishes spotted in South East Asia, for example.
“We really want it to be a celebration of local food,” Andrzejewski says, “a food lense or food vision about wherever you go. It really shows something about the local culture in any area.”
Pandora for food plus Google Ads for food plus Foursquare for food. Sounds great to me.
