Zest is an iPhone app that automatically builds a personal map and taste profile from a user's real dining history by linking a payment card through Plaid (read-only access, no transaction amounts). It surfaces recommendations based on where the user and their friends actually eat, replacing anonymous reviews and paid placements. The app can reconstruct up to two years of dining history and shows friends' favorite spots even in new cities, aiming to eliminate the "where should we eat" debate.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Most restaurant recommendation apps rely on anonymous reviews, paid placements, and trending content, which often fail to reflect genuine personal preferences. Users are forced to manually log their dining experiences or sift through irrelevant ratings from strangers, making it difficult to remember past favorites or trust recommendations.
Solution
Zest provides a personalized food and restaurant map that automatically builds a user's taste profile by linking a payment card through Plaid. With read-only access, the app identifies the names of restaurants, cafes, bars, and bakeries a person has visited over the past two years—without seeing transaction amounts or moving money. Zest then maps these places and generates recommendations based on the user's actual dining history and the spots their friends frequent, rather than on influencer posts or paid promotions. When traveling, users can check where their friends have eaten in that city before arriving. The app also preserves a searchable map of every past meal, including date-night spots and forgotten coffee shops, so users never lose track of a great find.
Target Audience
The primary audience is iPhone users who dine out regularly, travel frequently, and want personalized food recommendations grounded in their own and their friends' real eating habits.
Features
- Automatic card linking via Plaid with read-only access to transaction merchant names—no amounts are visible and no money movement occurs
- Two-year dining-history reconstruction that builds a complete taste profile instantly without manual check-ins or logging
- Social map showing friends' frequently visited eateries, including in unfamiliar cities, based on verified dining history rather than reviews
- Curated discovery of hidden gems, neighborhood staples, trending cafes, and top-rated bars matched to individual tastes
- List-building and sharing functionality for organizing favorite spots and recommending them to others
- No fake reviews or pay-to-play rankings; the algorithm is driven solely by real, repeat visitations