By Aimee Chanthadavong
Tapping into the growing smartphone market while also meeting the call of retailers looking for different outlets to communicate to their customers, Spectrum Analysis has launched mimenu.
mimenu is an app designed specifically for food retailers to receive customer orders via SMS. At the same time, it also enables consumers the convenience of putting their orders through their smartphone. .
Anubhav Tewari, mimenu co-founder and technical manager, told RetailBiz the inspiration from the app came from a personal realisation.
“Down on Chapel Street in Melbourne there’s a Dominos which I use to order pizza from and they had a smartphone app where I could put my orders through. But I realised there’s a gap in the market as there aren’t any apps that exist for other neighbourhood restaurants – only for the big guys,” he said.
“So I thought it’d be nice if apps did exist for your neighbourhood restaurants so their customers would also have that option of putting orders through their phones.”
The app for restaurants is setup by Spectrum Analysis on Android-only tablets or phones given Androids are open sourced platforms. The development of the app is free but restaurants are charged less than 10 per cent in royalty when a transaction occurs through the app. And if no transactions are made then the restaurant is not required to pay anything.
“We’ve done a lot of door knocking and spoke to a few restaurant owners who like the idea of putting orders through an app but they don’t know who to contact. There’s also an assumption it’s very expensive to do it and they didn’t know how the technology side could work but now there are no issues with mimenu,” Tewari said.