Built by food people, for food people.
We started DealsBanana because the apps we used couldn't tell us where the dum was good — and it turned out the same was true for mithai, chai, and everything else we grew up on. Generic delivery treats biryani as item #847 on a 2,000-item menu, and barely lists a sweet shop or chai stall at all. We built a coupon marketplace instead — restaurants, sweet shops, cafés, bakeries and more publish deals, diners claim them and redeem in person — because we treat this food as a craft, a culture, and a weekly ritual.
The problem we saw
On every major food delivery app, biryani is rated by a four-star average that blends together everything from a 14-hour Hyderabadi dum to a yellow-rice imitation thrown together in 20 minutes — and mithai, chai, and bakery items barely register at all. The customer can't tell any of it apart. The masters lose to the volume players. The craft gets flattened.
Meanwhile, the people who care most about this food — the ones who travel two suburbs over for a particular biryani or a particular sweet shop — have no platform that respects their knowledge. They share spreadsheets in WhatsApp groups. They argue in Reddit threads. They keep mental maps that never get written down.
What we believe
- Biryani is a craft, not a commodity — and so is mithai, and so is a proper cup of chai. A platform that loves this food must know the difference between dum and pukki, between fresh-made barfi and the boxed stuff, between authentic and adjacent.
- Curation beats coverage. We'd rather list 50 great kitchens and shops in a city than 500 mediocre ones. Less choice, better choice.
- The cook should win. Algorithms that reward fast over good are how generic apps got bad. We rank by craft signals — review depth, return customers, ingredient quality — not just speed.
- Honest is faster than impressive. Real spice levels, real portion sizes, real prep times. Surprise mirchi is a dealbreaker.
- Halal verification is non-negotiable. We trust vendors to declare it accurately, and we make it filter-first for diners who need it.
How we work
DealsBanana is a coupon marketplace: restaurants, sweet shops, cafés, bakeries, and more subscribe to a plan and publish coupons, and diners claim them and redeem in person. Businesses onboard in two clicks, then describe a deal in plain words — our agents draft the coupon image and copy, the owner tweaks it, and it goes live. We charge a transparent subscription, not a per-order commission, so the in-store sale stays the business's.
The marketplace is agent-run: AI agents handle the routine review and operations, and our team steps in only on the exceptions they escalate — and to block fraud. Paying for a plan activates a business; legitimate kitchens and shops are never held up by manual approval queues.
Where we are
We launched in 2026 in Houston, Dallas, Chicago, NYC, Bay Area, and Atlanta — and any US food business in our categories can subscribe and go live today, coast to coast. Don't see your city on our directory yet? Tell us.
The team
DealsBanana is run by a small team of food lovers, restaurant operators, and software engineers based in the US. We're not VC-backed and we're not racing to IPO. We're trying to build the thing we wished existed when we moved here.