The Indian food and beverage industry is changing and is now ready to take cautious steps toward joining the metaverse. Flaunted as the future of social media, the entry into the metaverse is not limited to issuing trademarks.
In fact, the bigger picture is different and involves bringing together the virtual and physical worlds, giving an immersive experience to the users. Metaverse is the future of the F&B industry.
According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the Metaverse market size is projected to grow from USD 61.8 billion in 2022 to USD 426.9 billion by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 47.2% during the forecast period.
Fast food chain Wendy’s opened Wendyverse earlier this year. The Wendyverse comprises a virtual reality of Wendy’s restaurant. While in India, Massive Restaurant’s Farzi Café and The Olive Group announced their foray into the metaverse.
Farzi Cafe’s being in the Metaverse is the most logical. Farzi Cafe serves modern Indian cuisine, which is cutting edge, and it has to be a step ahead in embracing technology. Currently, we are working with OneRare to create Farzi Cafe in Metaverse. With this, it wants to juxtapose the virtual world and the physical world. There is a lot to offer in the metaverse. For instance, at Farzi Cafe, users can play virtual games where they go and collect ingredients to create a dish. They can mint tokens, and these can be exchanged at any of our physical restaurants across the country.
Zorawar Kalra, founder and managing director, Massive Restaurants, said that just like no restaurant can do without being on Instagram, a few years down the line, they cannot afford to be without being in the Metaverse.
The Olive Group has collaborated with Hey Hey Global, an online platform powering experiential engagement between celebrities, influencers, and creators globally via new-age technology, where fans can discover and buy creator-powered NFTs. The Olive Group will offer NFTs, which will also include the group’s restaurants, offering one-of-a-kind physical and virtual experiences to its guests. In the works are plans to engage with Olive’s wider community via NFT and the Metaverse.
Constructing a food-verse
Supreet Raju, co-founder, OneRare, a metaverse for the Global Food & Beverage Industry, said, “We are building the world’s first ever foodverse. The idea is to create a more immersive experience for foodies as well as create a new marketing and monetization platform for the F&B industry.
To begin, consider how social media has evolved as a business marketing tool. They want to interact more and more with the community and its desires and shared experiences now. There is a growing need now to have stronger virtual connections. Secondly, this has been accelerated by the pandemic.
The food and beverage industry has suffered greatly in the last two years. The idea has been to create this new Web3 platform for the food industry. This allows them to create 3D experiences, issue their NFT, and create membership clubs with new ways of interacting with audiences, which isn’t a one-way connection or a 2D connection.
The idea of building a foodverse is to take the F&B industry to the Web. The aim is not to replace real life because it’s food and drinks, and one needs a taste to enjoy it.
The point of all this is to improve the virtual experience. So, let’s say right now you are craving a burger. You go on Google and check out places, or go on a food aggregator website or an app, make a choice, and then use a banking app to pay for it. You will even put your reviews online. There is a lot of time that is spent on apps through this entire process of discovering these new places. That’s what we are looking to do.
The idea is to handhold them and get them to understand the power of blockchain and what it can do for their business.
Also, the idea is to have people in their digital avatars, in Web3, come to the foodverse and spend some time, earning an NFT, to come back to the real world and swap for a real food item. So let’s say you come into the foodverse and play a game. You’ve won a burger, NFT. You can take that to any of our partner restaurants and swap it for a real burger as well.