You’re shopping with your beloved when suddenly it hits.
The pleasing bustle of the retail environment suddenly curdles. You’re hangry – and nothing is going to save you except for food.
This was Dan Abbotoy’s experience one evening in 2020. But when he looked up local restaurants, the search results heavily favored chains and did a bad job at singling out quality, nearby restaurants.
He thinks there’s a better way.
Abbotoy is the founder of the Food Court – dubbed “Tinder for Foodies” – which allows users to scroll through uploaded pictures of nearby restaurants in search of somewhere they truly want to eat.
“We’re building a platform that solves a problem for everyone who loves food, which is deciding what you’re going to eat without having it take 25 minutes,” Abbotoy said.
The Orchard Park native graduated from SUNY Buffalo State in 2014, then spent several years working at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. He enrolled in medical school at St. George’s University in 2016, but grew frustrated with the medical industry and dropped out.
He was introduced to Buffalo’s tech community through a Buffalo Startup Weekend in 2018 (Abbotoy is an organizers for the event’s return in April), where he launched a company, CastYourself, which he pursued for several years.
His first idea didn’t work out, but he learned valuable lessons about entrepreneurship that he will carry into the Food Court.
“I am very excited about this and I want it to be successful, but at the same time you have to take your hands off the wheel with the things you can’t control,” Abbotoy said. “I want to stay with what I can control and be confident in my ability to handle the problems that I’m not expecting.”
Abbotoy turned to the University at Buffalo’s computer science 611 course to help build the tech behind the Food Court. The course gives master’s students a chance to build working software.
The initial version of iOs and Android apps is now nearly complete, and Abbotoy plans to launch closed beta tests this summer. After using that process to troubleshoot and build new features, he hopes to launch.
Abbotoy said that while the core user experience – swiping through photos of locally prepared meals – is based on Tinder, the real force of the company’s potential comes from Instagram. The social media platform has a robust network of people who like to share pictures of their own food and to see pictures of other people’s food, but it doesn’t exist specifically for them. The Food Court will have features that allow people to connect with each other, and their locations, based on their profiles, location and preferences.
Basically, he built the tool that he wishes existed already.
“What I like to do is go out to dinner, take pictures of the food and then share them with my community,” Abbotoy said. “It’s a community that’s hidden in plain sight on Instagram.”
