FoodShaker review

Damien McFerran

We review FoodShaker, an app that's meant to take the stress out of choosing a restaurant but ends up wasting your time instead

Published on Nov 18, 2009

If you happen to be lucky enough to be able to afford to dine out on a regular basis during these harsh recessionary times then picking the right restaurant may strike you as a fairly taxing process.

Do you go for the traditional English pub grub or do you pick the upmarket French eatery? Or perhaps you feel like a taste of the Far East, or maybe something of Mexican origin?

Granted, there are certainly more pressing problems to worry about in the world – such as the rapidly diminishing ozone layer or children starving in the Third World, but it’s a quandary that we imagine flummoxes plenty of people on a daily basis.

FoodShaker intends to remove such issues from your life by randomising your eating habits. To use the app you input information relating to your favourite restaurants, including data such as the name (obviously), location and your own personal rating.

Once you’ve created a comprehensive database of your preferred places to dine out, then you simply shake your phone and a selection is made randomly, thus saving you the troublesome issue of having to decide for yourself.

The time saved can therefore be used for something more productive, such as picking the paint job of your next Ferrari or deciding which ludicrously expensive resort you’d like to travel to on your next holiday.

FoodShaker is an app in search of a problem. If you can’t pick somewhere to eat without turning it into a mini-drama then we have serious concerns for your mental wellbeing.

In addition to this, FoodShaker requires an awful lot of effort to get it working as intended. Having to manually input all of the information quickly becomes a chore. Considering that many other apps feature the ability to automatically search for local restaurants, we can’t understand why it wasn’t included here.

If you genuinely have trouble selecting where to dine out then there’s a chance Food Shaker might come in handy, but in all honesty we’d recommend you be less picky about such minor issues in life and find a more practical app to download instead.