
Apply HN: Food-allergy centric “yelp” - foodallergy
A common food allergy is gluten. It is difficult to find all the gluten-free food options nearby. One can use a service like yelp to find restaurants that specialize in gluten-free food, but this actually leaves out most of the options actually available because most restaurants do have some subset of dishes that are, or can be prepared, gluten-free. The problem with yelp is that all the metadata (tags&#x2F;review&#x2F;etc) are at an establishment level, but what is needed for this use case is metadata at the dish level instead. If one can search by dishes nearby that are gluten-free, the number of options available is much greater. This will enable one to find significantly more restaurants that someone who has a gluten-free diet can eat at and what dishes to order. Additionally, this helps find more restaurants that suit groups that have a mix of those with gluten-free diets and not.<p>There are also other common food allergies, such as peanut, tree nuts, milk, egg, soy, fish, shellfish that this concept can be expanded to include.
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ryporter
I'm sorry for sounding harsh, but this seems like a classic case of a feature
instead of a startup. Based on the way you describe it, this is an enhancement
that Yelp could add. Sure, it will be harder for them to do so than for a
nimble startup focusing solely on this feature, but Yelp has an huge, huge
advantage: they already have their network.

For you, building out a product with this feature is just the very beginning.
At that point, you'll have to face your biggest obstacle: attracting a
critical mass of users. As a potential investor, I would be far more
interested in hearing how you plan to accomplish this.

