App developer seeks to improve dining info

Gilberto Camacho

You may be familiar with mobile applications such as OpenRice and TripAdvisor, which allow people to search for restaurants in their cities. But Gilberto Camacho believes that it takes a higher quality app to better introduce local restaurants in Macau to residents and visitors.
Hence, he and his colleagues from Vector ITS Group, where Camacho is the co-founder and director, have developed the mobile app “Yummy Macau”, which has been available for download since the end of June.
Mr Camacho shared with the Times his vision for Yummy Macau in an interview yesterday. Being born in Macau but later departing the city, Gilberto Camacho said that when he returned he found that there’s actually a lot of value in Macau’s restaurants, which motivated him to develop the app.
“After I came back to Macau, I realized that Macau has a lot of quality but people keep complaining that there isn’t any. (…) I think that there are some good restaurants in Macau that are worth presenting to tourists and local people and I was thinking about making an application (…) and advertising good restaurants so that people coming to Macau, maybe by jetfoil or the airport, they can see that and say: this restaurant looks good and I want to try it,” he said.
“In the end, the final goal is that we want to upgrade and state the truth about the restaurant industry in Macau. We want people to know that Macau has very good restaurants and most of the good restaurants are in Yummy,” he said.
The income of Yummy Macau mostly relies on the membership fee that the restaurants have paid. When comparing his app with some similar ones on the market, Gilberto Camacho said that Yummy Macau focuses more on the quality of the restaurant because it only includes those restaurants that are considered good enough. In fact, his team will go and try the restaurants first before including them in the app. This has contributed to the fact that the number of restaurants on Yummy Macau is small compared to other food apps available.

The mobile app “Yummy Macau”

“People did not differentiate what’s good and what’s bad. They just put everything in the same bag. It’s like Yellow Pages where you have a lot of restaurants but you don’t know which one is good and which one is bad. In our rating [system], all are above 75 percent [approval rate]. This already proves that the restaurants [on Yummy Macau] are good enough. (…) We are very selective and restrictive. It’s not like a restaurant can just be added to the app,” he said.
But the director indicated that sometimes it is challenging to convince restaurant owners to join Yummy Macau. However, he said that since the membership fee is pretty small, those that joined them did not ask many questions. He expected that people will be more familiar with Yummy Macau within a year and more restaurants would be exposed to it.
In fact, Gilberto Camacho said that he was surprised by the reaction to their app since launching it three and a half months ago. He said that there are already 1,000 downloads in both IOS and Android platforms, despite the fact that they did not do any promotion. “People are looking for an app like Yummy. And maybe the name Yummy is also catchy. We were expecting maybe half of what we are having. Now it’s double or even triple our expectations,” he said.
Nevertheless, Mr Camacho said that they are not going to adopt a rapid expansion approach. “We are just focusing first to give good [service] to customers. Then maybe we can have profit or income,” he said. He added that they have no intention to put advertisements in the app yet before they are sure users are happy with the services it provides.