Parsley: Redefining the restaurant experience

Overview

The global food and beverage industry is growing at around 5% a year and global expenditure on food products by consumers is expected to reach US$20 trillion by 2030.

The food industry is itself made of the restaurants, supporting supply chain infrastructure, farms growing produce, and off lately the food delivery ecosystem. Since 2013, there are a number of new players who are trying to disrupt the food delivery sector. The market for food delivery however, stands at just 1% of the total food market.

Most of the transactions and the flow still happens within the confound of the restaurant itself, and there is still opportunity to disrupt the in-restaurant dining through the use of technology.

Introducing Parsley…

Parsley’s idea is to disrupt the in-restaurant dining experience by providing the users, an easy way to explore the menu, order at will and leave at their own convenience.

Empathize

The transaction at a restaurant is between the diner and the owner/staff.

For the user who visits a restaurant there are so many instances in a single visit where they wait for one thing or another, first to get seated, then for the staff to take the order, then for the food itself and then multiple back and forth with the staff to pay the check.

Also, as more and more technology enters a restaurant space and human intervention becomes expensive, there is a need from the owners themselves to optimize their table turn around times while still giving their users a good experience.

: Diner

: Owner

Define

Instead of “waiting” at every step of the dining experience, there is a need to make the whole process of eating at a restaurant more efficient, specially during peak and office hours.

Ideation

During the ideation phase, I looked in the use cases that will be important to support the user goals defined in the personas above. There were 4 main use cases when it came to managing transactions in V1,