<u>Impact Summary</u>
To leverage the Cardano blockchain to redesign and reenergise the entire food value chain by enabling relevant knowledge workers (recipe designers, recipe owners, farmers, food brands, restaurant owners, cloud kitchens, nutritionists and other food knowledge actors such as fitness coaches) to monetise their food related knowledge and content.
<u>Solution Description</u>
Our proposal is to offer these content owners and creators (i.e. recipe designers or owners who constitute the start of the food production value chain) a user friendly NFT based platform to secure and monetise their content (text, video and relevant metadata such as nutrition info, ingredients, cuisine genre, etc..) much like the music NFT model which offers downloads of music rather than only selling NFTs.
The key difference with traditional NFT marketplaces is that chefs or recipe owners will then be able to offer the use/downloads (vs. outright sale of the NFTs) of their content for a small fee, sell experience NFTs if desired and monetise their content on their own websites or Yumchain's own web2 AI driven marketplace. The Yumchain web2 front-end marketplace will allow consumers to purchase recipes (as downloads), experience NFTs with their favourite chefs, enjoy cooked meals delivered to them by API connected cloud kitchens and restaurants (also potential content owners) and even pay for private chefs to cook for them onsite.
Yumchain's marketplace will aim to expose APIs and onboard qualified partners to participate in the value chain including farmers, food brands, delivery aggregators, food tasters, kitchen inspection service providers and even other marketplaces that are vetted to offer access to the monetised knowledge/food repository of blockchain secured data.
The multisided marketplace will aim to generate API outputs that can be leveraged by other marketplaces, that reuse existing application scripts and possibly generate native application tokens to incentivise good behaviour of actors (not plagiarise recipes for example). Yumchain will aim to be built as a low code solution by reusing existing NFT technology, will rely on Ux and Ui best practices to drive adoption of Cardano NFTs on the backend and AI driven delightful Ux Ui offerings on the front-end to drive global adoption and consumption of goods and services that generate smart contract based revenues for NFT owners and the Dapp based marketplace (i.e. Yumchain).
Leveraging one of the existing Cardano NFT Marketplaces, along with Coti's FIAT payment integration solution and the power of a decentralised infrastructure, we propose the following preliminary solution:
The web2 front-end (with crypto and non-crypto payment options) would allow people who select criteria/preferences to find recipes to cook, order the ingredients to their house, order a cooked meal, or even book a private chef, etc.
The AI driven user experience will be much more engaging because of the metadata rich repository of recipes and content secured on the blockchain by NFTs and monetised using smart contracts. By opening up the marketplace with APIs to other websites, partners and marketplaces, we will be able to target a wider audience of customers for our Cardano minted NFT smart contracts.
To detail the solution further, we have split the offering into 2 parts, B2C and B2B below.
B2C Offerings: Guide me to cook a recipe, deliver a cooked recipe to me, cook it with me (private chef), send me the ingredients of the recipe (grocery store), build me a healthy meal plan and deliver it or guide me to cook it (Nutritionist and cloud kitchen).
B2B Offerings: Sell me a menu for my cloud kitchen (Menu-as-a-Service), build me a virtual brand for my cloud kitchen, use produce from our farm with these recipes, franchise a restaurant with this concept, and Menu-as-A-Service for restaurants built using authenticated NFT based recipes.
Some of the benefits of Yumchain include the following:
- Positive ROI on content creation investments by food professionals with the biggest share of revenue from downloads/sales of experiences going back to the owners
- Full ownership and transparency on revenues
- Instantaneous settlement of revenues (Coti/Djed will figure prominently as a partner on Yumchain)
- Direct marketing and engagement without intermediaries on content owners own platforms if preferred
- Perpetual revenue streams with options to fund charities, foundations or family office owned wallets
- Customised meal plan design capabilities and instant transactions between fitness/nutrition service providers, cloud kitchens and consumers
- Secure, immutable, permanent repository of content that cannot be de-platformed ( on a decentralise storage infrastructure for content and media)
- Ability to monetise and drive innovation around concepts/recipes/plans/etc for creatives and industry professionals
- Ability to create additional revenue streams through experience NFTs, collectibles, etc
- Cooking classes in the Metaverse and other educational and enriching experiences
- Ability to monetise existing content quickly with some chefs able to mint thousands of existing recipes and associated content
- Open APIs to an ecosystem of food delivery partners, cloud kitchens, grocery stores and other industry players
The following are some of the main challenges and identified as risks for this project:
- Reducing the complexity and friction of the NFT minting process for content owners
- Ability to onboard quality content leveraging the founders' network (celebrity chefs, food influencers, food brands, restaurants, etc..) for the platform to be attractive to customers
- Building a critical mass of content and a critical mass of buying consumers (enough variety for customers and enough customers for content owners)
- Marketing the NFT marketplace to content owners and the food marketplace to global consumers within target budgets
- The viability of building the solution with current technology in an efficient time frame on Cardano with the available technical resources