We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone in the thriving business journey of our respected client – Kitchenara. This culinary community app that’s revolutionizing the food delivery for enthusiasts and businesses across the Middle East, has secured its first substantial external funding of $380,000.
This is truly a remarkable development in Kitchenara’s business journey, and marks:
- solid validation of Kitchenara’s innovative concept that blends AI and TikTok-style-byte-sized content
- strong appreciation for CMOLDS’ product development support and services.
How Kitchenara is changing the food experience and value delivery
Kitchenara’s major impact stems from its core purpose and how it aims to work for food lovers and brands alike.
At its core, Kitchenara is a mobile application that utilizes Artificial Intelligence to revolutionize the way food is delivered and brands are showcased, with TikTok-style videos to highlight restaurants, food companies, and passionate influencers within the culinary sphere.
The platform will serve as a go-to place to seek delicacies and honest food-related advice for food enthusiasts, while opening a limitless new world of marketing for hospitality businesses.
While it is destined to become a safe place for discovering new food experiences, it is also establishing a platform for influencers as a unique opportunity to share their passion and earn handsome affiliate income and B2B sponsorships.
How Kitchenara aims to utilize the funding
According to the app founder, he plans to allocate the funding resources to the following KPIs:
- training the machine learning algorithms for giving personalized recommendations
- on-going testing and regular maintenance of the app to stabilize and improve the accuracy of content recommendations
- post-launch marketing for early-stage user acquisition
- strategic marketing to acquire B2B partnerships
Recommended Read: CMOLDS’ project FoodSnapp gets Grammy’s nomination for GBEA
Kitchenara’s App Development Journey with CMOLDS
We started working on Kitchenara by assigning dedicated teams that comprised:
- technical lead
- product development strategist
- project manager
- Senior UI/UX designers
- Senior frontend and backend developers
- testing and quality assurance analysts
- senior website developers
- SEO executives and content marketing professionals
- data scientist with capabilities in training machine learning models
After deploying the teams, we established an agile approach to executing Kitchenara’s development.
In addition, CMOLDS developed Kitchenara’s mobile application, as well as the website, which is currently working as the landing page to build Kitchenara’s brand awareness.
Discovery
The assigned product development strategist started with Kitchenara’s business and technical discovery step. During this discovery phase, CMOLDS delved into Kitchenara’s vision by understanding the goals of the app from the client. The team created documents , gathered requirements and conducted extensive interviews with the client to study the architecture he had in mind for this app.
After establishing clear goals, the product development strategists started market research and competitor analysis to create the most important deliverable of this phase: the complete product development strategy. It was during this phase that we realized we needed to do pre-launch marketing for Kitchenara to attract potential funding.
The product development strategy is the post-validation project scope document and comprises:
- market research report
- competitor analysis report
- monetization framework
- technology stack
- list of app features
- app and website development roadmap with timelines and milestones as KPIs
Design
After developing a solid understanding of the project scope, the design team kicked off the next phase by creating wireframes of each feature of the app to map the user journey within the application. This helped us refine the app’s structure and functionality.
Once the feature maps and user journey were approved, the design and creative teams collaborated on UI and UX design.
In the first phase of design, we created brand assets for Kitchenara – logo, color scheme, font, CTAs and buttons.
in the second phase of design, we created branded screens for the Kitchenara’s mobile app and website pages. The designers considered screen sizes and information hierarchy during the stage then transformed the previously created wireframes into high-fidelity, clickable prototypes.
Each app screen mockup highlighted:
- a specific app feature
- the navigation points on that screen
- the microinteractions
Similarly, each web page mockup highlighted:
- specific content layout
- sitelinks
- menu
- navigation points
- microinteractions
The design process was the most iterative one too – because we continuously processed feedback from the client and different team members, posted the creative head and improved. These iterations are important because they help us enhance and boost the user experience through critical analysis and comments.
Development
Right after the designs were approved, we set up the ecosystem for Kitchenara’s website development. With images and content ready, the domain and hosting set up, the custom coding took 8 business days and the website was forwarded to the testing department, up and running in the next 3 business days.
Simultaneously, the app development team divided the app features into sprints; with each sprint 10 business days long and 2 development resources debuted.
At CMOLDS UAE, each sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting, with project managers and responsible developers sit together to plan the technical part. Each sprint concludes with a sprint review meeting that highlights what went well and what could be improved. During sprint execution, project managers and developers meet everyday for scrum standups and meetings to reflect on daily progress.
Moving into development execution, the team at CMOLDS started with the implementation of the front-end interface.
Using the finalized designs as a blueprint, we built the user-facing components of the app and ensured pixel-perfect precision and functionality across different devices and platforms.
In parallel, the back-end development was underway, with a focus on establishing a robust server infrastructure to support Kitchenara’s:
- database
- user accounts
- API integration with third-party services
AI and ML integration was the third important part of development execution in Kitchenara’s development journey. During this period, the data scientist trained and fine-tuned the machine learning models on a massive food industry data. The main composition of this database is recipes and food videos.
The main purpose of these ML models is to recommend food cuisines, restaurants and content based on users’ likes, dislikes and preferences. To personalize the food discovery experience, the algorithms are trained to identify patterns in the app users’ behavior, for example, liking and sharing videos of specific cuisine, leaving comments on restaurant profiles, following hashtags and reviewing and rating food. After identification, organic and paid content will be recommended based on these patterns.
The most comprehensive and time-consuming part of the development execution is training the models – and so, at least 65% of the funds would be allocated to this KPI.
Testing
With development complete, Kitchenara’s first complete build was forwarded to the quality assurance department – where it underwent rigorous testing for user experience, security and functionality.
The QA team started with comprehensive functional testing, meticulously verified each feature and interaction to identify issues and addressed the bugs.
In the second step, the QA team completed performance testing to assess the app’s speed, responsiveness, and scalability under various conditions. This step ensured optimal performance for stakeholders: restaurants and business owners, end-users and influencers.
In the third step, the QA team completed User Acceptance Testing (UAT). In this stage, we gathered 100 profiles from the target audience and sought feedback from these real users. With their valuable feedback, we made 2 medium-level changes to enhance Kitchenara’s usability and overall experience.
As of now, Kitchenara is in its fourth step of testing. Our QA analysts are testing the application for security measures including encryption, data privacy and penetration. After this, the app will move for the fifth round of testing – which is unit and device testing where we will ensure the app is compatible with the decided devices, operating system versions and screen sizes under varying profile traffic and usage load.
After fine-tuning, the app will be pushed to the marketing department for pre-launch and launching KPIs.
The Journey To Finding Funds
Kitchenara securing this funding pre-launch is definitely a result of its groundbreaking potential in the food industry. According to our forecasts, it is going to make a measurable impact and reshape how the middle eastern restaurants and influencers interact with cuisines and talk about food.
Here are the top reasons why Kitchenara deserved this investment:
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Innovative concept
The merger of AI and TikTok-style videos for disrupting the food industry is a classic example of recombinant innovation. The mobile app, admin portal and the website – all based on this innovative user experience skyrocketed Kitchenara’s chances of receiving attention as well as funding.
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Inclusivity
Kitchenara aims to bring together food producers and consumers and promoters from around the globe. By going beyond boundaries, Kitchenara is establishing a sense of community and inclusivity.
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Authenticity
With a focus on real experiences and genuine recommendations, Kitchenara aims to become the go-to source for all-things-food.
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Monetization
Beyond social interaction, Kitchenara is committed to building a vibrant community through discounts, affiliate partnerships, and loyalty programs.
What’s in the Pipeline for Kitchenara?
Looking ahead, Kitchenara is poised for even greater success. With the future-ready idea of Kitchenara’s founder, financial and strategic support of its investors and the technical expertise of CMOLDS UAE, the app is set to expand globally and scale to new heights.
After the Middle East, the client has planned to forge strategic partnerships across the USA and Europe.
Furthermore, the app founder plans to build B2B partnerships with cooking equipment brands and vendors like meal delivery services.
On the corporate level, our product development strategists have recommended that Kitchenara introduces corporate plans for internal and external; for example, organizations can partner with Kitchenara to provide subsidized food (breakfast, office lunch, and even family dinners) to their employees.
Conclusion
The journey of Kitchenara from ideation to funding is an epic example of power of innovation, collaboration, and determination. We are proud partners in this journey and look forward to witnessing Kitchenara’s continued success in revolutionizing the way we experience food.
Do you have a brilliant idea like Kitchenara’s founder? It’s time to move from your lightbulb moment and take the next smart business move by sharing it with a mobile app development company in Dubai that has a reputation of building revenue-ready mobile applications and web-based portals – CMOLDS UAE.
Book a FREE 30 minutes session with our business strategist, Muhammad Saud and we’ll take it from there!
Get a project proposal, technology stack and monetization framework – this is a FREE, no-obligation deliverable from CMOLDS UAE as part of its mission to make a difference in the business ecosystem of the Middle East.
