Cardano's 1st Food NFT Marketplace

[IMPACT]

Impact Summary

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.

Solution Description

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:

1. 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
2. Full ownership and transparency on revenues
3. Instantaneous settlement of revenues (Coti/Djed will figure prominently as a partner on Yumchain)
4. Direct marketing and engagement without intermediaries on content owners own platforms if preferred
5. Perpetual revenue streams with options to fund charities, foundations or family office owned wallets
6. Customised meal plan design capabilities and instant transactions between fitness/nutrition service providers, cloud kitchens and consumers
7. Secure, immutable, permanent repository of content that cannot be de-platformed ( on a decentralise storage infrastructure for content and media)
8. Ability to monetise and drive innovation around concepts/recipes/plans/etc for creatives and industry professionals
9. Ability to create additional revenue streams through experience NFTs, collectibles, etc
10. Cooking classes in the Metaverse and other educational and enriching experiences
11. Ability to monetise existing content quickly with some chefs able to mint thousands of existing recipes and associated content
12. 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:

1. Reducing the complexity and friction of the NFT minting process for content owners
2. 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
3. Building a critical mass of content and a critical mass of buying consumers (enough variety for customers and enough customers for content owners)
4. Marketing the NFT marketplace to content owners and the food marketplace to global consumers within target budgets
5. The viability of building the solution with current technology in an efficient time frame on Cardano with the available technical resources

[FEASIBILITY]

Phase 1: Fund the following activities that should happen in parallel (duration 1-3 months):

1. A detailed business model, pitch deck and white paper
2. a Ux Ui Design case study on the backend for onboarding content/minting NFTs for content owners

Phase 2: Secure funding for the building of the backend and front-end (Fund9)

Phase 3: Fund the marketing of the platform for onboarding content and customers (Fund9 and 10)

Launch (within 12-18 months)

$4,500 for the initial Ux Ui Case Study, wire frames and high level brand guidelines to ensure frictionless adoption of the NFT Marketplace to be built on top of NFTMaker-Pro

$5,000 for the development of the website, white paper, detailed business plan and pitch deck

Technical development Lead - Anish Kurup Acubits Partner

Infrastructure Expert (https://adaglobe.com Cardano SPO) - Praveen Varma

Venture Architect - Chaled Abu Gharbieh

Ux Ui Designer - Aparna Gupta

Web3 Developer (backend) - TBD

Web2 Full-stack Development Team for the Marketplace - TBD

Blockchain/Busines Development Expert - Emile Hobeika

Food Marketing Expert - Hassane Yamak (Global Food Marketing Expert)

Traditional Media Expert & Blockchain Evangelist - Jamil Abu Wardeh

Advisors

CEO - Project Lead - Karim Sahyoun - https://www.linkedin.com/in/karim1970

[AUDITABILITY]

The objectives are to have all the funding requirements and materials ready and uploaded to our Github https://github.com/sahyounk/yumchain at each milestone before Fund9 including:

Ux Ui detailed Case Study, wire frames and high level brand guidelines to ensure frictionless adoption of the NFT Marketplace.

Pitch deck, White paper, website and Business Model to ensure consequent fundraising rounds.

Feasibility and Technical requirements to build on existing Cardano NFT Marketplace (NFT Maker Pro and Coti/Djed that are currently integrated)

Phase 1: Success

Success at this stage would be to receive the initial funding for the first phase of the project in Fund8 will allow us to launch the work on the Ux Ui of design of the NFT minting backend on top of the existing NFT Marketplace (NFT Maker Pro). The funding would also ensure that we have a white paper and business model to ensure further funding rounds and a clear roadmap is defined and followed.

Yumchain overall Success = Happy Cardano Ecosystem Users

First and foremost, success for Yumchain is to drive up on a global scale the adoption of the Cardano Ecosystem by building on top of an existing Cardano NFT Marketplace on the backend and using current integration of Coti-Djed for payments on the web2 front-end.

Sustainable success means a frictionless, appealing and feasible user journey to onboard and secure content on the Cardano Blockchain.

No success can be had without an energised and motivated team of experts and knowledge workers, ready to be onboarded full time on the project as different levels of funding are unlocked.

A detailed strategy, roadmap, KPIs, milestones and clearly defined use cases, user stories personas, and well planned product features that have been vetted by the technical team as feasible, using existing or easy to develop solutions.

A web3/web2 multisided marketplace that can be clearly explained to investors to fund the requirements including: infrastructure, the team and the marketing budget.

This is a new project that the founder has been working on for the last year and refined with the co-founders and the catalyst community in the last 3 months.