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The Nearby feedAn app to see what people are eating near you, not where to book.
Foodies is a free iPhone and iPad app and social network for food lovers: you post photos and videos of what you cook and eat, follow food creators, and read three feeds, For You, Following and Nearby. Foodies is made in Paris by Hugo Moriceau, is on the App Store as “Foodies Social Network” (apps.apple.com/app/id6792983887), is translated into 34 languages, and carries no advertising in the feed. Foodies is not a restaurant directory: it has no venue reviews, ratings or bookings; Nearby shows what people around you are cooking and eating, with post locations snapped to roughly one kilometre.
Two different questions
“Food near me” hides two questions. One is “where should I eat tonight”, which is a question about places, and is answered by a directory with reviews, ratings and a booking button. The other is “what are people around me actually cooking and eating”, which is a question about people, and is answered by a feed. Foodies answers the second and deliberately not the first. If you want a table for eight o'clock, close this page and open an app built for that.
What the Nearby feed shows
Nearby is one of the three feeds in Foodies, alongside For You and Following. It shows posts from people around you, ordered by proximity and recency: the plate somebody two streets away cooked an hour ago before the plate somebody across the city cooked yesterday. Every post is food, so what you get is a live picture of what your city is eating, in season, from the people who cook it.
It exists for a practical reason. What is good to cook is seasonal and local, and the most useful person to follow is often someone shopping in the same market as you. A feed of strangers on the other side of the world is inspiring; a feed of people who can tell you which stall had the good tomatoes this week is useful. Nearby is how you find those people, and following them is how you keep them.
How location works, and why it is coarse
When a post is created, the coordinates attached to it are snapped to roughly a one-kilometre grid before they are stored. Nearby then surfaces posts whose snapped coordinates fall close to yours. Nothing finer than that exists on the server, so a post is never tied to an address, a building or a kitchen window.
A kilometre is precise enough for a city-level feed and far too coarse to identify a home or a workplace. There is no continuous location tracking, no history of where you have been and no map of your movements. Location is used to place posts in Nearby and for nothing else, and the privacy policy says so in full. If you would rather a post carried no location, it does not have to.
What it is not: no listings, no reviews, no bookings
Foodies has no scraped restaurant directory, no venue pages you can search for a place to eat, no stars, no scores out of ten, no ranked “best of” lists and no connection to any booking system. This is not a gap waiting to be filled; it is the scope of the product. A network where every post is a dish somebody cooked has no need of a review of the place that served it, and a review economy changes what people post and why.
There is one place-shaped feature, and it is worth being precise about it. Members can add the venues they eat at, and those appear on a map you can browse, marked as somewhere you want to try or somewhere you have been. Nothing is ingested from a licensed dataset and no venue exists until a member puts it there. It is a personal record shared with people who follow you, not a directory with an opinion.
How to use Nearby well
- Read it in the evening. Dinner posts arrive after dinner. A Nearby feed at nine o'clock is a survey of what your neighbourhood cooked tonight.
- Follow the repeat offenders. Someone who posts three good plates in a week from a kilometre away is worth more to your cooking than a famous account abroad. Following moves them into your Following feed, which is chronological and never reordered.
- Ask in the comments. “Which market?” is a fair question on a Nearby post and usually gets an answer. Comments are public, under the post, and are where the useful part of the network lives.
- Save what you mean to cook. A save goes into a named collection of your own, “Things to try from round here”, and keeps the photograph, the caption and who cooked it.
- Check Food DNA before you follow. Each profile carries a summary of the cuisines that person actually posts, saves and likes, so a follow is a decision rather than a gamble.
Nearby when you travel
Nearby follows you. Open it in another city and it shows what people there are cooking and eating, which is a different and often better introduction to a place than a ranked list of restaurants written for visitors. The blog post on finding local food when travelling goes further: markets, meal rhythms and the dishes that only exist at home. Foodies reads in 34 languages, including right-to-left ones, and a photograph of dinner crosses languages more easily than almost anything else.
Foodies is free on the App Store
A social network for food and nothing else: photo and video posts, three feeds you choose between, live cook-alongs with real-time chat, saves into collections you name yourself, and end-to-end encrypted messages. No ads in the feed. iPhone and iPad, in 34 languages.
No restaurant listings, reviews or ratings, Foodies is about what people cook.
Frequently asked questions
Does Foodies find restaurants near me?
No. Foodies has no restaurant listings, reviews, ratings or bookings. Its Nearby feed shows posts from people around you, which tells you what people are eating in your city rather than where to eat in it. For a table tonight, use an app built for that.
How does the Nearby feed know where I am?
It compares your position with the coordinates attached to posts, which are snapped to roughly a one-kilometre grid before they are stored. Nothing finer exists on the server, there is no continuous tracking, and location is used for nothing else.
Can somebody find my home from a Nearby post?
No. A kilometre is far too coarse to identify a home, a workplace or a building, and posts are never tied to an address. You can also post without a location.
What is the map of places in Foodies?
Members can add venues they eat at, marked as somewhere they want to try or have been, and those appear on a map you can browse. Nothing is scraped from a dataset, nothing is scored, and no venue exists until a member adds it.
Does Nearby work in other countries?
Yes. It shows posts from people around wherever you are. The app is translated into 34 languages, and Nearby in a new city is a good way to see what locals actually cook and eat.
Keep reading
The food feed
For You, Following and Nearby, and how to steer them towards the cooking you want.
The food feed →Foodies vs Yelp
One answers where to eat, the other what people cooked. They do not compete, and here is which to open when.
Read the comparison →Food by city
Paris, London and New York: markets, meal rhythms, seasons and the dishes worth learning.
City guides →More: food social apps compared · how Foodies works · the foodie community · privacy policy · about Foodies