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 local food marketplace instead — deals, meetups, catering and rewards from restaurants, sweet shops, cafés and bakeries, all redeemed 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 what diners actually do — the deals they claim and redeem, the reviews they leave — and by how close you are, not by who shouts loudest.
- 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.
What we do
If you eat
- 🎟 Coupons you redeem in person. Percent off, dollars off, free items and BOGO from verified local food businesses. Claim online, show the QR, eat there. Most are free to claim; a few carry a small claim price, always shown first.
- 🍽 Meetups at local restaurants. Biryani tastings, chai pe charcha, singles evenings and ladies nights, hosted by the restaurants themselves. Grab a ticket, meet people, eat well.
- 🍛 Catering quotes, without the phone tag. Describe your event — or just tell Manvi — and verified caterers send quotes. You compare, you choose, you pay a deposit to confirm. Your contact details stay private until the booking is confirmed.
- 🥗 Office lunch, delivered to reception. Pre-order by the morning cutoff from a local kitchen — veg, non-veg or the healthy option — and it lands at your building’s front desk around 12:30. Prepay for the month and the price drops.
- ⏰ Last Call surplus boxes. End-of-day food at a steep discount instead of in the bin. Claimed like a coupon, collected before close. Good for you, good for the kitchen, good for the planet.
- 🎁 Prepaid vouchers. Pay a little now, spend more later at a restaurant you love — or give one as a gift. Unredeemed value comes back to your wallet.
- ⭐ Points every time you redeem. Earn points when you redeem in person and when a friend you referred claims their first coupon. Spend them on more deals.
- 💬 Ask Manvi — by text or voice. Tell Manvi what you feel like eating, where, and with whom. She finds the deal, books the tasting, posts the catering request. No login needed to ask.
- 🖼 Today's specials. Restaurants post their own daily specials and events as posters — nothing to claim, just show up.
If you run a food business
- 🎟 Coupons you redeem in person. Percent off, dollars off, free items and BOGO from verified local food businesses. Claim online, show the QR, eat there. Most are free to claim; a few carry a small claim price, always shown first.
- 🍽 Meetups at local restaurants. Biryani tastings, chai pe charcha, singles evenings and ladies nights, hosted by the restaurants themselves. Grab a ticket, meet people, eat well.
- 🍛 Catering quotes, without the phone tag. Describe your event — or just tell Manvi — and verified caterers send quotes. You compare, you choose, you pay a deposit to confirm. Your contact details stay private until the booking is confirmed.
- 🚚 Deliver lunch to office buildings. A daily window and a three-option menu, the buildings you can reach by 12:45, an optimised run with a pack list and a driver panel. Free on every plan; prepaid packs pay you per lunch when it is collected.
- ⏰ Last Call surplus boxes. End-of-day food at a steep discount instead of in the bin. Claimed like a coupon, collected before close. Good for you, good for the kitchen, good for the planet.
- 🖼 Today's specials. Restaurants post their own daily specials and events as posters — nothing to claim, just show up.
- ✨ Describe a deal; we draft the coupon. One sentence — "20% off weekday lunch" — becomes a finished coupon with image and terms for you to tweak and publish. Free plan: one live coupon at a time.
- 🤖 Your own Manvi, in the dashboard. Ask how your coupons are doing, what to post next, or "draft a BOGO for Friday" — she reads your numbers and writes the draft.
- 🌐 Manvi on your own website. One line of code puts Manvi on your site to answer diners about your menu, hours and deals — and take pickup pre-orders. Included on Growth.
- 🍛 Catering leads, matched to your kitchen. Requests near you that fit your cuisines and capacity land in your dashboard. Quote, chat with the host, and get paid on deposit. No subscription needed — a 10% fee on jobs you win.
- 🍽 Host a meetup. Fill a quiet night with a tasting, a chai evening or a singles night. We write the event page, sell the tickets, and scan them at your door.
- ⏰ Sell the surplus with Last Call. Post tonight's leftover portions as discounted boxes an hour before close. Money instead of waste.
- 🎫 Punch cards & prepaid packs. Buy-5-get-1 punch cards and prepaid packs — "30 chais for $25" — that bring the same customer back. On every plan.
- 📣 Your deals, posted for you. Live coupons are turned into social posts on a schedule, with a hold so you can pull one. Included on Growth.
- 🏪 Your own website, built and run by us. A fast website for your restaurant at dealsbanana.com/r/your-name — menu with photos, hours, directions, deals, online pickup ordering and an "Ask the menu" assistant — built from your printed menu and published only after you approve it.
- 📡 Found by AI assistants, not just search engines. Your listing, deals and hours are published in the formats ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google read — llms.txt, JSON feeds and an MCP server — so when someone asks an assistant where to eat near them, your offer can be the answer.
- 🔎 A free AI-visibility scan of your restaurant. Type your restaurant name and we check how you show up to AI assistants and search — hours, menu, photos, reviews — and hand you a scorecard with the fixes, whether or not you list with us.
- 🏛 Rent out your banquet hall or party room. List each event space with its capacity, photos and floor plan, answer the questions a South Asian event actually asks, and take enquiries with the date held while you reply. Growth plan.
- ✍️ Replies to your reviews, drafted for you. Every review gets a reply worth reading. We draft it from what the diner actually wrote; you edit it, or send it as it stands.
- 📊 What your offers actually did. Views, claims, redemptions and repeat visits for every coupon — so you can tell the offer that filled tables from the one that only looked busy.
- ⭐ Pay to sit at the top of the list. A monthly placement that ranks you first where diners browse. Always labelled Sponsored, because a listing that hides it is worth less.
How we work
Food businesses start on a free plan and describe a deal in plain words — Manvi, our assistant, drafts the coupon image and copy, the owner tweaks it, and it goes live. Meetups, catering leads and surplus boxes need no paid plan. We charge a transparent subscription for the bigger coupon plan, never a commission on the meal, so the in-store sale stays the business's; catering charges a percentage only on jobs a caterer wins, stated on the pricing page.
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
Deals, meetups and catering are live across the United States, city by city as businesses join; LunchBox office lunch is in Dallas–Fort Worth. Any US food business in our categories can sign up and go live today. 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.