How to Create a Restaurant App: Features, Cost & Tech Details

Sep 26, 2024

15 minutes

Contents

1. What is a Restaurant App?
2. Market Trends in Restaurant App Development
3. How to Create a Restaurant App - Step-by-Step Guide
4. How Much Does It Cost to Create a Restaurant App?
5. Top Examples of Successful Restaurant Mobile Apps
6. FAQ

According to the stats the global audience of users in the restaurant delivery market is expected to reach 1.5bn users by 2029. And 61% of consumers agree that restaurant apps are easy to use and would like their favourite coffee shop to offer one.

While you are still considering whether or not to develop a mobile app, your competitors are already gaining market share with their own apps. But keep calm: if you have an interesting restaurant concept, tasty food and a high level of service, you will find your audience. The main thing is to choose digital tools that can strengthen the brand offering.

In this article, we will guide you through the entire process of restaurant app development, from creating a concept and selecting features to searching for timelines and estimating costs.

What is a Restaurant App?

By 'restaurant app' we mean the mobile software that businesses use to manage customer service tasks, take orders, manage loyalty programmes, run online promotions and manage customer reviews. It can serve a single establishment or an entire international chain, depending on the server capacity and other available resources. In 2024 we can divide all types of food tech apps into three categories:

Online Grocery Delivery;
Online Food Aggregator;
Convenience Services.

Restaurant apps can unite features from all of them and customize their offers any way they need. Take a look for what restaurant app types it can be:

Food delivery – let your customers enjoy your food wherever they want and get more reach (and sales, of course). And we already have a few ideas;
Loyalty programme – motivate your customers to order more and get bonuses for doing so (more gifts – higher loyalty). Best features are mentioned here;
Reservation and pre-order service – solve the problem of queuing (and who queues in the modern world?) and manage the kitchen and staff to avoid delays and overruns. Look how it works in our case study;
Locator apps – interactive online map of the nearest restaurants, with the option of building a route to them, like the one we made for Beerpoint.

Beerpoint App

Or you can do even more – launch your own super-app which will unite all of these features and provide more competitive services for the customers, aiming for your brand not only selling food but also building the community. What way to choose? Depends on your restaurant size, business model and possible scalability.

Get what's right for you. And come and see us for a consultation.

Are you ready to turn your ideas into reality? Book your free consultation

Schedule a meeting

George A.

Business Manager

Why Your Restaurant Needs a Mobile App in 2024

The main reason for considering development is that your customers' behavior has changed significantly due to the impact of digital technology. Here are the key factors which prove the popularity of restaurant apps:

Rising smartphone users across the globe – the average person spends 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phone every day. So why don't you think people won't take a moment to order food from your restaurant?;
Digitization of payment services – as we all finally realize that сaching is inconvenient, most payments are processed online. So it will be easier for your guests to complete purchasing in a few taps instead of looking for coins in their wallets. Find the most popular payment methods here;
Popularity of mobile wallets – users don’t want to waste time to connection their credit cards to each new service, that why common payment systems are on-demand now;
Growing e-commerce businesses – “buying and shipping everywhere” concept has blurred the boundaries of selling products and services. Today, you can stay in touch with your audience wherever your delivery reaches them. Learn more trends in this article.

E-commerce trends 2024

Let's run through the list of trends, divide them between confident leaders of retail and small players, and also discuss the role of IT technologies in all this commotion.

Read article

Own app vs Third-part services

One of the questions that many restaurateurs often ask themselves is: “Why do I need to create an app for my restaurant when there are already plenty of food aggregators and third-party services on the market that I can integrate with?”. On the surface, it may seem like you could save money on development, testing, design, and user support, as well as accelerate your entry into the food technology market.

However, you also need to consider the losses from mistakes in orders that are beyond your control, such as order cancellations due to high delivery costs and lack of direct contact with customers, as well as the lack of personalisation. We have listed some key points below to help you compare and make more informed decisions.

Are you concerned about having enough resources to create an app for restaurant? We can help you optimize the process.

Are you ready to turn your ideas into reality? Book your free consultation

Schedule a meeting

George A.

Business Manager

Market Trends in Restaurant App Development

The restaurant market in the UK is expected to reach £9.5 billion by 2026. The global food tech market size was USD 278.71 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow from USD 293.54 billion in 2024 to USD 444.35 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 5.32% during the forecast period.

There are basic features that may be developed if you want to create a restaurant app in 2024:

And here is our example of a development delivery application for a fast-growing company. Check it out.

Trending Features in Restaurant Apps

And here are the features that customers expect to find in your restaurant app in order to keep you as a competitive player in the market.

Personalisation

Restaurant apps are all about remote service, but technology allows us to add features that create the illusion of personal involvement in the ordering process, making it feel like a unique experience. And here some ways to increase the loyalty:

Add a filter menu that allows to choose dishes based on their dietary restrictions, such as vegan or gluten-free options;
Provide allergen warnings and alternative ingredient suggestions to avoid allergies or food intolerances;
Offer customer support via an in-app chat feature with quick response times;
Allow users to leave feedback and rate their experience with the food, service, and overall experience at our restaurant.

POS Integration

A restaurant cannot operate without a point-of-sale (POS) system, which means a specialized device with software that allows merchants to accept payments and record transactions. However, most of these systems are provided by global services and local banks. Therefore, the challenge lies in integrating them seamlessly into the app. This means that all core operations related to purchases and payments should be reflected in the POS system.

Our vision is to offer solutions that enable restaurant owners to create a restaurant app by integrating their existing POS and other products into it.

Digital Menus

Today's menus not only provide full ingredient and nutritional information for each dish, but they also feature 360-degree images and AR effects. Using mobile apps, customers can visualize how the meal would look on their plate, creating an immersive experience. This technology is setting new standards and transforming menus from boring lists into showcases. Pair products and offer seasonal discounts to encourage customers to order more and explore the menu.

Loyalty Rewards Programs

Discounts don’t value as much if you don’t make it personal. Here some trends you should think about to create mobile app for restaurant:

Gamifications – engage your audience with game-like elements, such as time-limited promotions, prize draws, polls, quizzes, quests, etc. Get more trendy ideas here;
Group accounts – ability to share bonus points with other users and make gifts to each other is a good way to build a community around your restaurant;
Cross-partnerships – collaborate with other companies to create stronger offers for your customers.

The prize sector, or how to make the user want to buy from you

Read article

QR Code Payments

The concept of contactless dining is an experience that avoids close contact with restaurant staff and minimizes touching shared surfaces. And if everything is clear with the delivery orders, how can you implement payment without staff in the restaurant itself? It's very simple: after placing an order at a table (which can also be done in the app), the user can scan a QR code at the end of the table. The system matches the order to the restaurant's table number, which has already been entered at the POS, and the payment is automatically debited from the linked card.

If you are worried about guests leaving without paying for their food or drinks, you could consider installing beacons at your restaurant's exit. These sensors would connect to a customer's device when they leave and initiate a payment process.

iBeacons integration

One more trend in restaurant delivery apps is the use of iBeacons. These are small Bluetooth devices that can detect nearby smartphones with a restaurant's app installed. They allow restaurants to share information with customers in a more personalized way. For example, a customer might receive a notification when they walk into the restaurant with a special offer or a reminder to use their loyalty points. This can help increase customer engagement and retention, as well as improve the overall customer experience by providing timely and relevant information. By using iBeacons, restaurants can offer more personalized services and make the dining experience more enjoyable for their guests.

iBeacons can help streamline restaurant operations by providing proximity-based services. For instance, when a customer arrives at their reserved table, an app could notify restaurant staff to start preparing their order or send a digital menu to their phone. These beacons can also help with contactless check-ins, table reservations, and automatic payment processing when a customer leaves. Read more about iBeacons here.

How to Create a Restaurant App - Step-by-Step Guide

Now, let's take a look at the main stages of restaurant application development, considering the complexities and challenges involved, and how we can overcome them.

Conduct Market & Business Research

If your offerings are not based on data, there is no guarantee that the market will actually need them. We recommend you to start with secondary market research for studying public reports on food tech and restaurant trends, the audience needs and finding the feature and offer you can successfully compete with. And then go directly to your customers with primary market research – ask them about their expectations, barriers and service quality requirements. More options for conducting market research and its efficiency for restaurant app development you will find here.

How to get started with market research

Read article

Choosing the Right Type of Restaurant Mobile App

Your product-market fit should be based on your strengths:

Have the sources to put the work in the kitchen on high flow – add delivery to reach a wider audience;
Focus on providing quality customer service – organise online reservations with pre-ordering to make dinner being served at the expected time;
Support the concept of healthy eating – customise ordering options to allow the user to manage the composition of dishes according to their diet.

Choose a Tech Stack

Modern businesses are not trying to take over the market one by one. Instead, they are building digital ecosystems, where restaurants have a website, mobile app, and a web app in Messenger. This trend has been discussed in this article.

Product launch on messenger apps: Telegram web app opportunities for businesses

How web applications in messenger apps can help businesses to generate leads, promote products and services, and test new features and services.

Read article

That's why it's crucial for restaurant mobile app developers to create cross-platform solutions, using the same code across all formats and channels your business uses. This allows for easy updates across all products your restaurant offers. The benefits of this approach are outlined here.

How to build a Web App. Part II: Deploying Telegram mini-app

We're continuing our experiment with building an app in React Native that functions as a Telegram Web App

Read article

We choose to use React Native development for our cross-platform projects for iOS, Android and Huawei. To see how we work and the results we deliver, check out our portfolio.

Design a Restaurant App

Let's say your restaurant already has a website, and to save money, you want to use it for restaurant mobile app development. However, we know that this could lead to bad user experience and high churn rates. Because app design is not about beauty, it is a visual communication language that speaks to your customers. For better understanding, it should be direct and clear.

The first way to find some ideas and insights is the case study and searching for UI/UX trends. Here you find our examples of beautiful restaurant apps interfaces.

Another way is to think through the user journey, put yourself in the customer's shoes and ask yourself questions:

Is there enough information on the menu to make the meal desirable?
How many minutes does it take from opening the app to ordering?
Do all buttons and prompts lead to targeted actions?

And don’t hesitate to ask for the first user's opinion. Conduct focus-groups and observations to identify weak points and gaps in purchasing logic to make improvements in design.

Book a consultation with our team to discuss the visual concept of your restaurant app.

Are you ready to turn your ideas into reality? Book your free consultation

Schedule a meeting

George A.

Business Manager

Develop an App

The development process is divided into sprints, which are time intervals during which the restaurant app developers complete a specific part of the work. This allows you to monitor the progress of each sprint and make improvements as needed to strengthen your product.

As an experienced restaurant app development company, we have learned one thing: it's important to test the product thoroughly. Rebuilding the product logic from scratch and continuously fixing bugs can be more expensive than involving quality assurance (QA) from the start.

And once everything is done, the only thing left to do is to publish your restaurant app in the AppStore and Google Play to attract the first users.

How Much Does It Cost to Create a Restaurant App?

And let's answer the main question: what are the restaurant app development costs?

But here the average prices for basic features set you can calculate together:

Personal account with users – $2-4k;
Menu – $2-4k;
Integration with ambassador and connection of different payment methods – $2-7k;
Order management (addresses, delivery format, repeat order, comments to order) – $2k+;
Loyalty programme (simple one ) – $2k+;
Online chat with support – $3-4k.

Add to this cost for design – $5-7k. And don’t forget about the estimating 10-30 % for testing. That’s how we’ve got $25-30k to create the restaurant app.

In case you’d like to add gamification (like this one) tools, be ready to pay $8-12k.

Top Examples of Successful Restaurant Mobile Apps

Now let’s talk about the most famous restaurant mobile app solutions to grab some inspiration. In the US DoorDash has the largest market share, followed by Uber Eats and then Grubhub.

In Europe, Just Eat Takeaway and Uber Eats are competing for first place in most countries. In the UK, the race is between Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats for the top spot.

If you think that all of these apps operate with a similar toolset, you're wrong. Every product team is trying to implement more features in order to simplify the purchasing process and compete for customers' precious minutes of their time.

Uber Eats, for instance, now allows customers to search for a restaurant using an emoji and place an order ahead of time for pickup at the airport to avoid queuing at the counter prior to their flight.

DoorDash offers a subscription model with free delivery and discounts on all orders. And Just Eat has a "Best Match" search filter that provides recommendations based on a user's past orders and preferences.

When developing a restaurant app, it's important to focus on the needs of your customers. Conduct research to understand what prevents them from ordering, and then create features that can help them overcome those barriers and make them happier with delicious meals.

We are always ready to share our insights and experiences. So let's get to know each other.

Are you ready to turn your ideas into reality? Book your free consultation

Schedule a meeting

George A.

Business Manager

FAQ

How much does it cost to build an app for a restaurant?

The average price for restaurant app development is $25-30k.

How long does it take to develop an app for a restaurant?

From 3 to 9 months.

What should a restaurant app have?

Clear UX with trendy design interface, simple user journey, basic features with personalisation (menu, order management, delivery options, in-app payments) and loyalty program.

How to make an app for a food business?

Create the concept of the app and find product market fit. Conduct market research to see what customers really need. Build the MVP (Measurable Value Product) and test it efficiency. Launch the app and scale it according to market trends.

Tags:

Booking System & Reservation Software Foodtech E-commerce Loyalty program Restaurant App Development Startup Grocery Solutions