Hungry.lk is a website, which provides food promotions from varying cafés and restaurants for people who are searching for meal deals. This week, on the Food Factor, we speak to Rasika Jayasinghe, who is the Marketing Manager at Hungry.lk. He revealed details of the website, and its functions and who runs the site.

What is Hungry.lk?

Sri Lankans are very specific and enthusiastic about their meals. They eat 3 times a day and 2 snacks in between meals and there is no doubt that is the number one need of any human being. We at Hungry.lk identified that need and decided to provide information on best meal deals on town. This is a publicly available website people can visit and be informed about meal deals online. At the same time restaurant owners can publish their food deals via Hungry.lk and be published.

The idea behind Hungry.lk is to simulate a ‘virtual food discount store’ online. We provide only food promotions and restaurants details for the users who are searching for foods and meals and restaurants. And an opportunity to the food store owners to circulate their meal deals across large number of users. We collect data on the user’s interests and show them the ads that they are really interested in. This facilitates a user who is interested in pizza to get the Pizza Hut promotions.

When was the website launched to public?

The website was launched a month ago and was able to collect more than 2500 fans within the first two weeks of operations.

What is the concept and what was the reason you came up with the idea for a website of this nature?

We faced many difficulties to find a location for dining in Colombo and sometimes we missed many good deals on food promotions too. There is no single place to access meal promotions announced by different merchants. That made us making a virtual market to the merchants and users to meet and create buy sell virtually. This is a win-win situation for both parties. 

Whose idea was it to launch the web site?

It was my idea to launch the website.

 Who runs the web site?

Team Hungry.lk consists of a team of enthusiastic and talented people including software developers, software QA engineers and designers. Some of the functions are outsourced at the moment and major percentage is done in-house. The management consists of M. Dissanayake, CEO while R. Prabath and I are co-directors.

How does the website partner with Restaurants?

Hungry.lk acts as a virtual market for the users who are looking for meal deals merchants who are eager to spread their promotion details to a large number of users.  We have over 200 restaurants in our database, and if a new restaurant comes in, they can register with us and then they can become partners with us, and they can post their promotions to us, which we will spread across to our users.

What services does Hungry.lk offer?

We provide information on meal promotions, a promotion calendar, a promotion map to view restaurants with promotions on Google Maps,   maps for restaurant locations, a search for restaurants based on preferred cuisine or meal type,   Facebook campaign for promotions, advertising and a trend analysis based on different customer segments.

How often does Hungry.lk have a new promotion?

Weekly for the moment. Our goal is to have daily promotions and make it a habit for users to check our website before going out for lunch.

Hungry.lk is on Facebook too, so check the page for regular updates. 

By Sarah Kellapatha