Tired of Cooking This Season? Let Facebook Feed You
This fall, Facebook announced the newest addition to its host of offerings: food ordering. Now you can search through a curated list of restaurants categorized by location, cuisine, and price point to help you easily find the exact right dining choice to satisfy your cravings. You could spend your weekends prepping meals for the week or sifting through different food-ordering apps… or you could just turn to Facebook.
The new feature centralizes ordering from national delivery services like Delivery.com, DoorDash, ChowNow, Zuppler, EatStreet, Slice, and Olo, as well restaurants with in-house ordering systems such as Wingstop, Papa John’s Pizza, and Chipotle. It’s available on Facebook via iOS, Android, and desktop.
If dining establishments have their own Facebook page, they’re linked to from the “Order Food” feature, which will allow hungry customers to access food reviews, photos, and comments about each eatery. Even if there’s no Facebook page available, you can still read reviews your friends have posted about the restaurant in order to help you make that sometimes tough judgment call between pizza or Chinese.
Facebook won’t charge any fees to use its new service, and won’t share in any portion of the profits from the orders placed via its social network. And Facebook itself won’t be doing the deliveries, even though you order directly through the app; all delivery and pick-up will be handled by third-party delivery services that the company is partnering with. If a restaurant works with multiple delivery services, customers can select the service they prefer. To streamline the process, Facebook allows customers to use an existing log-in or sign up for the service without ever leaving the Facebook app.
Sure, it may seem like Facebook is just recreating a service that many other apps offer, but the social media giant thinks a convenient browsing experience informed by friends’ suggestions beats an unpersonalized mobile search that offers arbitrary recommendations. So whether you don’t have time to make dinner or want to grab a quick lunch at work, since you’re probably already on Facebook anyway, just add a couple extra taps for your takeout order. We think this is going to get a lot of Likes.
Have you used the Facebook food ordering feature yet? Tweet us and tell us how you like it @BritandCo.
(Photos via @firmbee and @eaterscollective / Unsplash)