In the past few years, very few industries have experienced a meteoric rise, both in usage and endorsement than the food-tech sector. When you sit to think about it, the reason behind this growth is relatively simple. The food-tech industry is an amalgamation of two entities that are very much significant to man – food and technology. 
While food, as a basic necessity, has defined the course of human behavior, technology has endeared itself to us by making our lives substantially easier and better. Thus, it is only logical in the hindsight to imagine that an industry stemming out of both these entities would take humankind by storm and create unprecedented ripples in terms of its market disruption and revenue generation. A food app is one such invention that combines basic necessity with technological advancement.

The Problem Statement At Hand

Subsequently, in a bid to develop their own food app, entrepreneurs and business professionals of late have been increasingly inclined towards exploring and canvassing the prevalent online food delivery space out there. However, there are certain things that one needs to keep in mind before embarking upon such an endeavor. 
Though the food application business implications are enormous and demand ever-rising, the vertical risks extreme saturation concerning application features and utility, over time. As more and more individuals are striving to develop their food app, they’ve all, in varying degrees, meted out terrible oversight to that one aspect that lies at the core of these applications — technology. 
Although there exists a large volume of similar apps. The uniqueness that they offer to their users in terms of customer-experience and utility stands compromised. 
Every day, as technology evolves and redefines its horizons, it also presents us with a multitude of opportunities and possibilities. To make their food app rise above the competition, business owners must devote ample time and resources to integrate the latest technology into their applications as seamlessly as possible. 
One must realize that in the tech-world, the concepts of AI and Cloud Computing are no longer just fancy buzzwords.  Rather is a dynamic proof-of-concept that drive tectonic shifts in industries across the globe. 
Besides transforming businesses overnight, these concepts have allowed entrepreneurs and developers to visualize food application development in a different light altogether. It has become imperative for the concerned business professionals to prioritize the cloud and AI tenets while building a food app of their design.

Introduction to Cloud Kitchens for Food App

For a couple of decades now, we’ve been using cloud computing for everything from storing our data and streaming large volumes of information to essentially running entire businesses on it. It is only practical that now we looked at it through the lens of ordering and delivering food. This is where cloud kitchens come into the picture. 
The purpose of building Cloud Kitchen is to make food exclusively for delivery. Cloud kitchens are large-scale commercial facilities and commissary kitchens. They are also called shared kitchens, ghost kitchens, and virtual kitchens. Virtual restaurants refer to the delivery-only food brands that operate within this structure. As commercial food production facilities, most cloud kitchens are centralized and licensed in nature. There exists no bar when it comes to the number of restaurants that can avail their services. 
A dozens and hundreds of food brands and restaurants can rent space on cloud kitchens to put together delivery-optimized menu items. Additionally, a particular restaurant also has the liberty of operating multiple brands and virtual restaurants. They can run under a single roof or have the kitchen modified to act as an incubator. It is a split between different vendors simultaneously. 
The menu items on a cloud kitchen are optimized for ease of production. It ensures food quality reliability at the delivery time. Completely tech and analytics-driven, cloud kitchens consider large volumes of data to determine the most sought-after categories of food items in a specific location and the hours of the days in which the maximum orders are placed.
There are multiple business models that one can adopt while running a cloud kitchen. They can vary from adding a delivery brand to a pre-existing brick-and-mortar restaurant to operating a new virtual restaurant altogether.

Advantages of Cloud-based Food Apps

1. Cost Cutting

The major roadblock restaurant owners face while running business is cost management of staff and other related operations. This is where cloud kitchens prove extremely beneficial by making the most efficient use of on-demand labor. 
Virtual restaurants incur significantly lower costs than their physical counterparts. It deletes the need for paying rents for the store locations, front-office operations costs, seating costs, and other related logistics costs. As a result, business owners get the liberty to invest the amount saved in other core aspects of the business in question and aim for subsequent growth and expansion.

2. Improved Efficiency

Cloud kitchens introduce a greater degree of efficiency into your operations by using custom-built spaces. It also streamlines core operations to optimize the business’ delivery processes.
Suppose you’re running multiple virtual restaurants. In that case, you can simultaneously prepare different menus, and design. The kitchen can accordingly optimize the speed of preparation and cater customers within the requisite time slots. The cloud and AI allows kitchens to efficiently keep a tab over their multiple outlets and generate reports.

3. Real-time Adaptability

Since most cloud kitchens are analytics and data-driven. They streamline and optimize their delivery and staff scheduling processes by taking their audiences and consumers’ behavior into account. Subsequently, this allows cloud kitchens to upgrade continuously. However, also push for improved menus and increased profit margins at all times. 
This adaptability of virtual restaurants empowers them the liberty of launching a brand just for a specific season. Apart from that, consequently it allows them the space to cash in on all relevant topical and trending moments.

4. Digital Brand Awareness

Virtual restaurants stand to gain better and quicker exposure than their physical counterparts. It becomes possible due to their tie-ups with popular food delivery apps. 
These apps use topical and influencer marketing strategies for their promotion, allowing them to improve their visibility and brand awareness. As the number of daily internet users continues to register a meteoric rise with every passing day, it has become vital for food apps and platforms to establish solid digital brand awareness to interact and engage efficiently with their customers.

Use of AI in Food Apps

Every leading food app utilizes Artificial Intelligence to distinguish between different categories of food items such as veg and non-veg, dairy and non-dairy. They make use of the technique of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to expand their operations and transcend their geographic boundaries, resolving all intrinsic linguistic barriers. 
AI also allows these apps to provide their customers with a customized interface based on their interests and preferences. With AI at their disposal, food apps can plan ahead of their customer demands and accomplish high user satisfaction levels.

Advantages of Using AI for Food App

1. Efficient Planning

AI allows food apps to execute their plans and operations in a highly structured and systematic manner. Food apps have the option of setting up custom AI algorithms in place that can analyze emerging food ordering trends in the market and incorporate them into the eventual app design. 

2. Forecasting Demands

Food apps use AI models to predict their customers’ food ordering demands in terms of food categories and the hours of the day in which these orders are placed.

3. Enhanced Optimization

Often, optimization is viewed solely to determine the best routes for the delivery agents associated with the app. However, it also includes optimizing the demand of the customer in its scope. 
With AI at their disposal, these firms can now develop highly curated lists for their users, subsequently gaining a more comprehensive idea about their interests and preferences.

Conclusion

As a budding entrepreneur and business owner, integrating cloud computing and AI models into your food app can appear to be a rather challenging affair. Without the right guidance at your disposal, you stand to create an app that is redundant in its functionality and utility. Along with that might also delivers a sub-par user-experience to its customers.
Before integrating the functionalities of cloud and AI in their food applications. It is essential that budding entrepreneurs and business owners first familiarize themselves with the general scopes of these comprehensive tools. Doing so allows them to come up with an application that is in alignment with the latest trends and sentiments of the market. It also caters to the needs and requirements of the target audience at all times. Thus, contact or share your ideas on Supersourcing to take your business online. However, in no time you will get multiple reliable development agency option to deliver quality product.