
Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup? - hrayr
When a group of developers start meeting regularly for lunch, it&#x27;s almost inevitable for them to create an app -- within days -- to answer a real question: What the heck should we eat today?<p>This happened to me on more than one occasion. Here&#x27;s an old one from where I worked at long time ago: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.venarc.com&#x2F;lunch&#x2F;<p>I&#x27;m curious to see what other startups&#x2F;groups have come up with. List your startup and a link to the lunch picker (if it&#x27;s public).
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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_.

~~~
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?

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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 :)

~~~
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.

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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.

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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.

~~~
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.”

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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.

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100k
We've used this one: [http://wtfsigte.com/](http://wtfsigte.com/)

Crude but effective.

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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...

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tonyvanriet
Picking lunch wasn't a big problem for us, but typically one person would go
pick up the lunch and pay for it, so I wrote a Slack bot to keep track of how
much everybody owes. Helps a lot with minimizing the number of times you
actually have to pass money around. [https://github.com/tonyvanriet/lunch-
bot/blob/master/doc/wal...](https://github.com/tonyvanriet/lunch-
bot/blob/master/doc/walkthrough.md)

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JasonH09
I created an app for just my group of friends to pick where to go to eat.

It had tags for different places and would narrow the selection down and
ultimately pick one. You could say where people in the group had been recently
and they would be removed, say which area of the city you wanted, delivery,
take-out, dine-in, fast food, and other properties. People also had profiles
where they could choose restaurants they didn't like and when you went through
the picking wizard, you would indicate who was going and it would discard any
restaurants that those people disliked from the potential pool. A random
number generator would then make the final decision from the possible options.

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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.

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mikejchin
We've been experimenting with voting systems in order to decide where to eat.
We weren't sure which system was the fairest, so we built apps that used
plurality, probabilistic, instant-runoff, and preferential voting. It reached
the point where we were voting on which voting system to use!

The system we settled on was a modified Borda count
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Modified_Borda_coun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Modified_Borda_count)).
Our app isn't public, but I recommend this system, because it seems to have
maximized happiness in our company!

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adambutler
Ohh yes... [http://imgur.com/J8H7SZm](http://imgur.com/J8H7SZm)

We're from Bristol, UK and do lunches for everybody (read more:
[http://simpleweb.co.uk/2013/why-we-feed-our-
staff/](http://simpleweb.co.uk/2013/why-we-feed-our-staff/)). We started
working on an app for this but this was dropped in favour of simplicity and
just do it through google forms.

Here is an example form ->
[http://imgur.com/LgC2l79](http://imgur.com/LgC2l79)

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underyx
Here's what we used at Allmyles:
[https://github.com/underyx/footlong](https://github.com/underyx/footlong)

There's an Android app that lists the daily menus in Budapest, Hungary, where
we're located. From there it was just a matter of finding the internal API of
this app, and hooking it up to HipChat. We migrated to Slack and haven't yet
got around to updating footlong to post the results there, though. I checked
our HipChat yesterday and it was practically nothing but footlong posts.

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fittom
In Berlin we have a small startup based on this idea. You can subscribe to our
newsletter and we send you the daily menu of the restaurants in your area
every day. With forwarding this e-mail to your colleagues, all of you can
select the favourites using the up-vote buttons in the email. You can track
the votes on the website, but you will receive a summary about the results as
well. Give a try if you in Berlin:
[https://www.halb1.de/](https://www.halb1.de/)

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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

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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 :)

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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/](https://fuseorder.com/)

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

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egeozcan
I had created "The Lunch Planner". There's a barely-functional demo at:

[http://providefoodfor.us/restaurants](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.

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nhdev
I wrote [http://www.collablunch.com/](http://www.collablunch.com/) for this
purpose. The team uses it pretty regularly. And yes, way over engineered. I
have it on my todo list to rewrite it in Meteor since a lot of the Web Socket
code I wrote Meteor would have handle automatically.

------
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!

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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.

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olav
What a sharp observation. I had one at
[http://dreitipps.de](http://dreitipps.de) (yes, German). when I worked with
my colleague of sweetbits at a startup for generation 50plus.

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hrayr
I'll get the ball rolling. Here's Venarc's lunch picker that's probably 7-8
years old. [http://www.venarc.com/lunch/](http://www.venarc.com/lunch/)

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kayman
I released an app recently.

[http://lunch-picker.com](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)

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lewisl9029
Google Forms worked great for the last startup I worked at.

[https://www.google.ca/forms/about/](https://www.google.ca/forms/about/)

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herval
In all companies I worked on (around 20 including consulting clients, at least
half in various cities in the US), I've never came across this
"inevitability". Bad sample?

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ohmyiv
My last job (not a startup) used wheelof:

[http://wheelof.com/lunch/](http://wheelof.com/lunch/)

Pretty cool. I've also used it in different cities.

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joakiml
[https://github.com/miniloko/slack_lunchbot](https://github.com/miniloko/slack_lunchbot)

For our lunching needs in Sweden, Skövde.

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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.

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castell
I prefer the hassle-free variant: a large canteen/lunchroom with a good
variation of food to choose from. They usually have a menu-plan on their
websites.

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pgz
When in doubt, we used this.

    
    
      irb
      xs = %w(indian antichi ramen vietnamese bue pastificio)
      xs[rand(xs.size))]
    

Otherwise we talked to one another.

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theaccordance
Check out Fooda: [http://fooda.com](http://fooda.com)

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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

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simonw
When I worked at Yahoo UK back in 2006ish someone wrote an app to do this.

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evan_
We wrote a bot for our hipchat room that just picks from a list.

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jmp3833
my manager at my previous company (EnerNOC inc.) did the same thing!
lunbo(lunch-board) lunboard.appspot.com/home

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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.

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rectangletangle
To some extent, yes.

