Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Two Udaipur developers turned the food-ordering ritual into the whole product
FoodNeverComes gives visitors 22 kitchens, a simulated checkout and an AI call from a rider who cannot find the door. The site says 2.7 million people have been through it since June.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- FoodNeverComes lets a visitor pick from 22 cuisines, add dishes to a basket, watch the total climb and hit checkout, after which a tracker shows a rider on the way to an order that does not exist.
- The site says more than 2.7 million people have visited since it launched in June, a figure it reports itself.
- Its catalogue runs to 22 kitchens, 327 dishes and 319 real recipes, dressed with fake prices, a simulated checkout and a fictional delivery experience.
- The last step is an AI-generated call from inside the site, in which the rider says he is outside the building but cannot find the street or the door.
- The format took off in South Korea and has spread to sites such as Dopamine Shop and Fakehaul, which mimic shopping and travel as well as food delivery.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost A recovery discount sent to a user who came for the browsing spends acquisition budget to interrupt someone who already got what she wanted, and the campaign reports it as a win either way.
- capability The half of the experience users enjoy can now be shipped by two people with a recipe list, fake prices and a delivery animation, with no kitchens, riders or payment rails to fund.
- constraint Cart-adds and checkout starts are weaker intent signals than a funnel chart implies, because for part of the audience that behaviour is the purpose of the session.
Parmar recalled his mother's habit at the checkout screen: "She would add things to the cart and say, 'I will order this later'" [12]. Sharma had his own version with electronics, filling an online basket and abandoning it [13]. In a retail dashboard both of those sessions are abandoned carts, and the standard fix is a recovery email or a shorter checkout. Parmar and Sharma, both 26 and working out of Udaipur in Rajasthan [7], treated the sessions as complete and built a site where the ritual is the whole product.
Eight of the 327 dishes listed have no real recipe behind them [5]. The site's slogan is "The food never comes - but the dopamine does" [6].
Ravi Dhar, who directs the Yale Center for Customer Insights, calls the pleasure of looking forward to consumption "anticipatory utility" [14]. Anticipation can beat ownership, he said: "The thrill is in the chase" [15]. Once the object is acquired and the tension resolved, according to Dhar, psychological arousal falls [16]. Kent Berridge, the University of Michigan neuroscientist who separated "wanting" from "liking", holds that dopamine drives the first and not the second [17]. "Some situations can trigger 'wanting' by itself," he said [18]. Anna Lembke, the Stanford addiction psychiatrist who wrote Dopamine Nation [19], told the BBC that "To call dopamine a chemical of pleasure is an oversimplification" [20].
The visitor total is the site's own count, and the BBC's account does not include repeat visits or session length [2][25]. A visit count tells you people arrived once. For a product whose claim is that the ritual satisfies on its own, the test is how often the same person comes back to run it again.
For anyone operating a real basket, the split worth making sits inside the non-buyers. Two things distinguish a user who abandons a cart: whether a nudge converts her, and whether she returns to browse without buying. The user who converts on a discount was blocked, and the checkout work that teams already fund is the right answer for her. The user who returns, fills a basket and leaves again got what she came for, and a discount aimed at her is money spent to interrupt a satisfied session. The measurement that separates the two is repeat sessions per non-purchaser. Most funnel reporting does not break it out.
Parmar's own version of this ran at food delivery checkouts. During a two-month project in Mumbai he was spending 5,000 to 10,000 rupees a week on food [8], roughly 40,000 to 80,000 rupees over eight weeks [9], including Belgian waffles, ice cream and once a large jar of sour cream he barely wanted and gave away to friends [10]. He said "perhaps the real craving was not always for the food, but for the ritual of ordering it" [11].
What to watch
- Whether the founders publish repeat visits or session length, the figures that would show whether the loop retains anyone.
- Whether a real delivery platform ships a browse-only or wishlist mode that copies the part of the flow users enjoy.
- Whether the travel versions of the format, such as Fakehaul, report traffic of their own.