We all know how culinary tours usually work. It’s hard to find the right tour at the right time for your schedule, and when you do, they are often too long, or too short, or not exactly what you are looking for. You shuffle around in a pack together with a group of strangers, trying to fit in, culinarily and otherwise, feeling vaguely dissatisfied, while, lastly, experiencing the local food culture through the intermediary of the guide, who mediates between you, the meals you are eating and the people who prepared them for you.
If you are looking for a culinary tour based on your personal preferences, one that you can do yourself, at your own time and pace, and that lets you interact directly with the local foodies, you will be interested in a new culinary start up set to launch July 2016 in Berlin, Germany. To find out more about it, Trip and Travel Blog sat down for a first behind-the-scenes conversation with founders Yael and Michael Weiss.
There are dozens of culinary apps out there – what makes bitemojo different?
Bitemojo is a culinary-travel product, not another source of content. Intended for foodies, travelers, and, actually, anyone in fact who is interested in learning about destinations from a culinary perspective, we provide customized biteTours that enable you to experience first-hand the food, the people, and the vibe of the local culinary scene. Right now anything tailor-made is available only in the format of private guided tours, which, starting at 250 Euros, are often out of reach for many, who then have to make do with group options. Bitemojo’s vision is to make personalized culinary tours affordable to everyone.
We understand you put a lot of focus on the “bite” element in your product, why?
Bite is indeed basic to the DNA of bitemojo. It’s not just the way we developed our product, it’s how we believe we should explore the world we live in. Taking bites allows you to learn more about a place than you can by going to a 3 star Michelin restaurant. When you go on a biteTour of six bites, you eat at six different places, taste six different versions of local cuisine, meet six different people who share with you their unique sense of their neighborhood or city, and taken as a whole have a much broader sense of place than you would get sitting down to a single three or four course meal. And there is a philosophical element to it as well. Small and compact, bites support sustainability; an ideal of eating some and leaving for others that is part of being a responsible traveler. Bites also support small businesses – the street-food, food-market vendors and small special food boutique stores that we feel provide all the charm, interest and authenticity of a given neighborhood.
What would a biteTour experience look like for travelers? Anything special beside the bites?
Once you download the app we’ll present you with all the biteTours we are offering at your destination. Besides a walking biteTour, we also offer Bike & biteTour and Bus & biteTour options, which allow you to combine a biteTour with other sightseeing activities such as a bike tour or the hop-on-hop-off city tour and enjoy exciting bites along the way. The biteTour itself is a really fun activity, in which you go on a quest to discover delicious bites and enjoy the thrill of reaching the red flag at the end. Customers can also collect biteCredits along the course of the tour and receive free bites based on sharing and gifting opportunities. When you finish the biteTour, an achievement screen will congrats you and summarize your experience.
You are launching in Berlin this July, what can you offer our readers at Trip and Travel Blog?
Readers of your blog will probably agree with us, discovering the world through food is a highly social and engaging activity- food pleasure aside. We took it upon ourselves to make these experiences more accessible for all travelers out there and we would like to hear what you think.
Your involvement is important to us as we aim at launching new cities, new itineraries and new products over the next months and this will happen primarily based on your feedback. If the concept sounds appealing to you, this is your opportunity to be part of it!
