Appetece, a new way to choose where to eat on weekdays in Barcelona

In a city like Barcelona, where the gastronomic offer is as wide as it is diverse, deciding where to eat during the week remains, paradoxically, an unoptimized task. In this context, Appetece was born, an application that proposes something very simple: to gather in the same space the daily menus of restaurants and allow consulting them based on location, facilitating a quick choice adapted to the available time. The tool works like a map where you can discover options by price, type of cuisine, or restaurant, optimizing both the search and the displacement.

The idea stems from a shared observation between its founders, Marc Boada and Gonzalo Polo, linked to the restaurant world, who detected an unresolved daily need: finding a midday menu is still a fragmented process, based on street blackboards or social media posts. "What we seek is to centralize the information in the same application and make it easy for both the user and the restaurant," explains Boada, co-founder of the platform.

The origin of the project is not a great technological disruption, but a real need detected in daily life. The difficulty of finding quick and accessible options for lunch, especially on working days with little room for decision, "In the end, it's common: you have little time and you don't want to be wandering around thinking where to eat," explain Boada and Polo. This friction, shared by office workers, groups of friends, or anyone with a limited break, was key in the development of the proposal, which works like a map where you can consult menus by location, price, type of cuisine, or restaurant, while also promoting the discovery of new spaces.

Beyond the end-user, Appetece focuses on the restaurant as a key player. In this sense, the application seeks to solve a specific problem: visibility. "The main problem for restaurants is that people find them," they point out. "Beyond a close radius, many menus go unnoticed, even if the restaurant has followers on social media." The platform allows digitizing and distributing the menu easily, even incorporating artificial intelligence tools that automate the process: "With a photo of the menu, the application reads it and uploads it automatically," explain its founders. The fact that menus are planned days or even weeks in advance facilitates their programming within the platform, which allows keeping the information constantly updated. Currently, in full growth phase, the application currently has more than 100 establishments in Barcelona.

The choice of Barcelona as a starting point is not casual. The city brings together a strong gastronomic culture and a wide offer of midday menus, which allow access to quality restaurants at more affordable prices. "The midday menu is a way to discover restaurants that would normally be more expensive," they point out. "You can eat well for 15 or 20 euros and that opens up many possibilities." In this sense, the app not only solves a functional need, but also acts as a gateway to urban gastronomic exploration, expanding the user's range of options beyond their usual habits.

Focusing their efforts on gaining visibility and consolidating their presence in the city. "Right now we are not focused on monetizing, but on growing and making ourselves known," explain the co-founders. The application already has a mobile version available on the App Store and a web version, while the team continues to collect feedback to improve the product and develop new functionalities. With a minimal initial investment and development based on an agile product approach, the project is already looking beyond Barcelona. The next stop will be Madrid, with the intention of replicating the model in other cities.