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One of the first things those starting a new food or drink business will want to know is which dishes they should include on their menu and how they should be priced. Food Genius is a platform that lets food and drink vendors quickly put together a dish concept and – by analyzing the ingredients in dishes on over 100,000 menus across the US – see how much the average consumer would pay for it. The first company to complete IDEO’s Startup-in-Residence scheme, Food Genius started with the intention of creating an app to help diners find restaurants serving the meal they wanted to eat by sourcing a large database of individual ingredients found in existing menu options. During its time in the mentoring program, the company eventually realized that this information could be leveraged for a more useful tool. Users now search the database for the basic ingredients in their proposed meal – for example ‘chicken’ and ‘pasta’ – and Food Genius offers up information on which nearby restaurants serve dishes with those ingredients, which other foods are often paired with them and existing popular recipes that include those items. It includes accurate data on the number of menus that include a dish with the search terms and the distribution of additional ingredients in those meals. Users can refine their search, specifying the exact type of pasta they want to use, for example, or discovering which pasta type is most often used with their other ingredients. All of the data is displayed through a visual user interface to make it easier to quickly take in the search results. The video below offers more information on the service: Basic access to Food Genius is priced at USD 2000 a month, with extra features included on more expensive packages. Could this kind of well-designed big data service be useful in other industries? Spotted by: Murtaza Patel