Amid the sea of restaurant and dining options on the planet today, there are also seemingly as many websites dedicated to restaurant reviews and recommendations. A new platform, though, aims to make it even easier to find appropriate meals for vegans and vegetarians at any restaurant.
The new platform, called abillionVeg, is the brainchild of Vikas Garg and a Singapore-based team of developers aiming to marry TripAdvisor and Instagram in an effort to promote more vegan food options across the globe.
Those points also overlap in the overwhelming absence of vegan menu items at restaurants around the world despite the growing population of people identifying as vegan or flexitarian–omnivores simply seeking more plant-based menu items because of health, environment, or animal welfare concerns. According to Garg, most restaurants "have 4-5% vegetarian options and 2% or less that are vegan." The goal of abillionVeg is to improve that score and by doing so "improve sustainability across the board," he says.
If it proves successful with food, Garg says abillionVeg will take on a larger review engine model for supermarket food items, personal care, and eventually clothes, shoes, and accessories. It's no small task; last week's episode of CBS's "60 Minutes" profiled Google's omnipresent dominance not just in search, where it has a 90 percent market share, but now in reviews, too. Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman demonstrated for Steve Kroft how users may think they're clicking out of Google for reviews but, particularly on mobile devices, they're often only seeing Google-generated review content on the first screen page. Google's review dominance has taken its toll on Yelp and other major review platforms like Angie's List already, and for smaller niche platforms like abillionVeg, it could be a painfully steep uphill battle to first-page listing. But it's a battle Garg is willing to take.