Tweetjemee: A Restaurant In The Cloud

Dreaming of running your own neighborhood restaurant? Then start here. Tweetjemee is Dutch web service for home-based cooks to serve people nearby. The idea is that anyone with cooking skills can prepare some extra food and sell this to others that do not feel to cook. A ‘buurtchef’ (neighborhood chef) can easily start a so-called ‘webtaurant’ (web restaurant) by signing up on the Tweetjemee website. After registration the chef can add a style and upload pictures with it, to give identity to his/her new online restaurant.

The chef lists what he/she cooks, adds a price label and let others know when the meal can be picked up or, if he/she wants, consumed at the chef’s kitchen table. Customers select a meal nearby by searching by ZIP code. They can pay on the Tweetjemee website and pick up the food at the agreed time. Payments are transferred to the chefs monthly, minus a 20% listing fee for Tweetjemee and another 10%, which is donated to The Hunger Project.

This concept of home-based cooking services is emerging worldwide, being part of a trend addressing sustainability issues in a crisis economy. Last year Springwise wrote about the ‘sellsuming’ trend (selling is the new saving) covering several initatives, such as Book of Cooks, a US-based online marketplace that helps consumers find local chefs who are willing to cook for them. A month ago, Milla wrote about a cool social media-based project in Sweden in which energy provider Vattenfall enables people to save energy by dining together. In France, the initiative Super Marmite enables cooks with too much food to sell their extra servings. By the way, Twitter is not amused by the name Tweetjemee, as it has registered the word ‘tweet’. However, according to Tweetjemee the name originates from a Dutch gastronomical expression, referring to a diner for two.