Urban Food Sharing: Rules, Tools and Networks by Anna R. Davies

Author:Anna R. Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Great Britain
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Come dine with me: Eat With and Viz Eat

Viz Eat is a European-based for-profit initiative founded in 2014 that uses a web platform to match cooks with diners who wish to eat together with others. According to its website, Viz Eat is ‘the world’s leading community for authentic food experiences’, operating in over 130 countries by 2018. In 2017, Viz Eat acquired Eat With, a similar platform established in San Francisco in the US that aims to bring people around the world together ‘to access the underground food scene and connect with creative, open-minded and interesting people’ (Eat With, 2018). Before its acquisition, Eat With identified 650 hosts (cooks) in 20 cities across 50 countries, creating 1,500 menus for 11,000 dinners and more than 80,000 diners. Whereas Eat With emphasised the creative connections to be made through a foodie sub-culture, Viz Eat has focused on connecting local hosts with travellers seeking off-the-beaten-track experiences. Both initiatives emphasise the social dimensions of eating together and the cultural benefits that accrue from it, with Viz Eat explicitly seeking an immersive food experience and ‘authentic’ dining experiences, cooking classes and food tours for participants.

The apparent scale of Viz Eat’s activity is impressive, with its website claiming more than 20,000 hosts and 150,000 Viz Eaters by 2018, and with localised versions of its app available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. Its acquisition of Eat With, which itself had already raised around $8 million from financial backers, was seen as a way to further expand its global offering by bringing global tourism partners into the mix for Eat With hosts. So, rather than relying on bespoke dinner parties made up of individual strangers, the Viz Eat model uses travel and tourism agents to provide block bookings for hosts, guaranteeing numbers of diners and taking some of the logistical uncertainty out of the process. Viz Eat’s acquisition of Eat With by was also not its first. In 2015 it acquired Cookening, a French-based early pioneer in the space of shared dining experiences.

As with Ripe Near.Me, the practices of eating together through Eat With and Viz Eat were explored through ethnographic research in Barcelona and Athens, respectively, in order to understand the activities behind the platforms of both initiatives. In contrast to more locally situated meal-sharing sites set up to share food with locals (such as Comparto Plato in Barcelona, which offers food at very competitive prices), the immersive experiences on offer across Eat With and Viz Eat were higher, sometimes higher than many mid-price restaurants in central areas of both cities.

Across both platforms initiatives give an impression of bountiful offerings, while lively eating events and spaces are portrayed. However, on drilling down into these online events, researchers found that in both cities there were limited experiences being offered by individual hosts, with a small core of events being offered repeatedly by the same individuals. In Athens, which was an emerging site for Viz Eat during the research conducted in 2017, events were sponsored by

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