How to build a metaverse for foodies

In 2021, OneRare was only a food metaverse game, founded by husband-wife duo Supreet Raju and Gaurav Gupta, which ran on NFTs and blockchain. A year and a funding of two million dollars later, the Web 3 startup is working to add another layer to the mix, the hyper-real virtual restaurants. Many leading chefs, including Saransh Goila and Vicky Ratnani, have partnered with the company to secure themselves a place in the world’s first food metaverse. We met OneRare’s co-founder Supreet Raju in a coffee shop in South Delhi and asked why she is striving to build a metaverse for chefs, restaurants and foodies. Edited interview excerpts follow:

Let’s address the elephant in the room.

Q. Are you building your metaverse for a future where humans will eat virtually?

Supreet Raju and Gaurav Gupta – the cofounders of OneRare

Supreet Raju: No, not at all. That is dystopian. Somebody in Japan came up with a technology where you can lick a board and get the taste of food, and frankly I don’t want anything to do with it. For me, the experience of food lies in the real world. To put it very simply, the foodverse we are building is a round cycle. Somebody goes and plays our game and they get rewarded for it with an NFT. That reward can come to the real world because you – the end user, the foodie – can swap the NFT you earned in our game or elsewhere for a meal at a restaurant, and for us, that is a cycle.

What we are doing is that we are taking a very real industry like food into a technology inside Web 3. So if you go to social media and you are following a popular chef, it is because their content is fun. The content format will itself move from 2D to 3D in a decade. So that is what we want to be. We want to be the immersive Instagram for the food and beverage industry. We’re building the world’s first food metaverse, which basically allows the global food industry to come into Web 3, use blockchain technology to monetize and market their business better.

Q. How will a Web 3 game help in the business of chefs and restaurants though?

Vicky Ratnani's NFT

Supreet Raju: The most engaged user with the blockchain right now is the gamer. Blockchain as a technology is very complicated. The way it is presented is even more complicated. So for somebody like me from a design background, when I would read about blockchain earlier, it made me feel stupid. Blockchain is designed in a way that it’s so tech heavy that people don’t really get it. So that’s why games have started doing well, not just ours, but others, because they simplify the technology and they make it more engaging for the user. 

To be very honest, we started as a gaming project. So when the idea first came to us in January 2021, the NFT market was booming. My cofounder Gaurav Gupta, also my husband, has been in the blockchain industry since 2017, so he was well aware of this space. I had worked on a few projects as well. So when we saw NFTs, we wanted to make a creative project around it. We chose the topic of food because it is something that everybody knows. You’ll have a favorite dish. You’ll have a dish you’d never eat. Everybody has this natural love for food. So we thought we’d create a very simple game where, let’s say, you want to make French fries. You need cooking oil, potatoes and salt, right? So we created a game where you need to collect these ingredients as NFTs. When you collect all the ingredients, you can go to the kitchen and cook up the french fries. So we’ll take away these ingredients from you and we’ll give you the French fries NFT. That is how we started. 

Then the question became, what do you do with these french fries? Why are you making this? So we created more layers where we have a playground where you can use these NFTs to run food truck wars. You can run your food truck and you can play against other players to earn money for your food truck or partnering with other brands where, let’s say, if you have a OneRare coffee NFT, you can come to this coffee shop and swap it for a real coffee as well. So we kind of have been growing our project every month in the scope, but we started as a very small NFT game. We thought that gaming is how people can understand it.

Q. So you have gamers engaged in a food-based Web 3 game, and you’re kind of trying to push them towards these restaurants?

NFT

Supreet Raju: I think, for us, the idea is to attract the foodie community. When you look at people in a restaurant, everybody has different tastes, different styles and different desires. Even when we use Instagram, for example, I use it as a viewer. Somebody else is using it as their actual career option. So when you use any particular product, there are different needs to be met. Similarly, when we’re creating this foodverse of ours, there is an attractive feature for the gamers. There is an attractive feature for virtual restaurants and ordering. There is an attractive feature for live events like hosting a master chef in the metaverse, so it would be different audiences. The idea is not to encourage the gamer to start ordering food, the idea is to create a better tool. 

For the virtual restaurant, let’s say, you decide that you want to order something from a new place. You would go to Google reviews and maybe check out which places are close to your location. You’ll go to their Instagram or you’ll go to Zomato, you’ll place that order, and then you’ll go to the banking app to pay for it. Somebody will call you, contact you, give you the order, you may go review it tomorrow. So there is an entire process where we use a lot of things in our phone to get to food. That is pretty much what we are putting in the foodverse. You can walk into this restaurant virtually, through the foodverse, check out how the restaurant looks, check out the dish you’re ordering, all in 3-D. You can go and even put your burger together in the foodverse as per your liking and the restaurant will make the same burger for you. So it’s just the idea of improving your virtual experience, making it more immersive than ever. 

Q. At what stage of development is your foodverse at?

Supreet Raju

Supreet Raju: We have already launched our gaming layer. It’s already live, so you can actually go right now and make your NFTs. We haven’t spoken much about our virtual restaurant layer because we don’t want to confuse our community. But we’ve partnered with a lot of people. OneRare has collaborated with celebrity chefs like Arnold Poernomo from Indonesia, Indian chef Saransh Goila, Dutch chef Jamie Van Heije and restaurateur Zorawar Kolra, who owns Massive Restaurants and Farzi Cafe.

Q. How do you convince these chefs and businesses to get onboard with your vision of the foodverse? I am assuming not everyone will be familiar with Web 3 and the metaverse?

One Rare game

Supreet Raju: What happens with chefs is that there are two kinds. Any food brand, either they know nothing or they know a lot to the point where they have themselves invested in a project. Even the ones who know nothing, they’ve heard in the news the word NFT, but they don’t, of course, understand the technology. That’s where we come in because for any chef, the idea of launching his NFTs has two problems. One, how do you do it? Where is the tech to do it? Second, why would someone want the NFT?

It’s a very important question that was not answered in the previous year. 2021 was the year when people were launching NFTs just for the heck of it. Taco Bell did it. Pizza Hut did it. But 2022 needs utility in NFTs. So what we do with the chefs is that we set up a meeting and we take them through the process of how this works. So we generally collaborate on two specific points. The first is our gaming layer, so we launch their best dishes in our game.

For the second layer, the virtual restaurant, we brought them through the process of what it is that they are seeking out of it. For example, for chef Vicky Ratnani, we are working to launch a state-of-the-art hyperreal restaurant and kitchen in the metaverse. The idea, like I said, with each of our partners is to simplify blockchain because blockchain is just a technology. We don’t go asking what Instagram builds on. None of us ever ask even what Zoom is built on. We just use the app because it’s convenient for us, it’s productive for us. So we want our foodverse to be that layer in the food and beverage industry.

Q. Like most Web 3 founders, you left India for Dubai. What were the challenges of running a Web 3 business in India?

Supreet Raju: I think the most challenging thing, not just for us, but for many companies, was the lack of regulations. To be honest, we waited a lot for the regulations because we believe in being an India-first project. We’re very proud that an Indian project is the world’s first food metaverse and we got global recognition for it. And for us, it is a very big deal. But in our case, because we are fundraising on our token, there have been no regulations for us on how to accept it. So we moved because we felt that our business would stagnate if we sound stuck to our investors. 

I think what we need from the government, it’s just a bit more understanding of the space of the industry and moving beyond the fact that it’s crypto, more into allowing people to have the framework to structure it as a technology oriented business. So I think that is something that not just us, everybody is currently seeking.

Q. What are the advantages that Dubai offers?

Supreet Raju: So right now, Dubai, as a government, is really embracing blockchain technology. They held the Dubai Metaverse Assembly recently, which is a private event of 400 people organized by the Crown Prince. So he’s hosting us. We are speaking on panels there to talk about what we are building and how the government can help us. So they are currently very much into it. They are setting up regulations extremely fast for how companies can accept fundraisers. Frankly, that was the prime reason for us to move. We needed a place where regulations would be more clear.

Q You say that nobody can predict what the metaverse will look like in a decade’s time. If I may play devil, where do you think your business will be in the next ten years?

One Rare game

Supreet Raju: For us, we want to be an enabler where people should not be mystified with blockchain technology. It’s on us to provide tools that make it easy and simple for any brand to grow on it. The exact model of how they will grow that I can’t predict. I don’t know what tools we will be providing them because tech is in the process of building. The idea is to just be that enabler where anybody in the global food and beverage industry is on the metaverse. 

Follow Us

Anup Semwal

Anup Semwal writes at the intersection of technology and society. He is currently pursuing Convergent Journalism from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia View Full Profile