Eatery is an app built for goal-based eating out

What Is Eatery?

Eatery is an app built for goal-based eating out. Kyle Sanders, founder and CEO of EateryAI Inc in Irvine, started building Eatery in 2023 to find meals by his budget and nutritional goals when eating out. He was tired of logging his macros and budget in apps he never stuck to.

Eatery is not Eater.com, not another restaurant, and not Cornell Dining's Eatery. Eatery: Eating Out Made Easy is a mobile app built to make eating out easier.

Kyle Sanders' Restaurant Roots

Kyle actually started his restaurant journey over a decade before the app. At 11, his family moved from the Atlanta area to Southern California. His mom inherited the family's restaurant, Toko Rame Indonesian Restaurant, in Bellflower. He grew up in the restaurant industry — it was his first job, at 16. Although Toko Rame survived COVID-19, his family sold the business after 28 years to the former chef. Kyle has a dream to reopen Toko Rame someday, and to market it on Eatery.

Why Is It Called “Eatery”?

The name came from Kyle's time at the University of California, Irvine. The Anteatery was one of the campus's dining halls — everyone on campus simply called it the “Eatery,” and the name stuck. When founding EateryAI Inc, Kyle didn't want the brand's connotation to be specific to health and nutrition — he wanted a unique name, similar to “Yelp” or “Spotify.” The vision: people saying “Let's check the Eatery app,” “I found this on Eatery,” or “The Eatery app helped me hit my goals.” Eatery's goal is to become your go-to app for eating out — not just by reviews.

Building Eatery at UC Irvine

Eatery started as a startup at UC Irvine, competing in the university's business competitions including the New Venture Competition and the Beall and Butterworth engineering competitions. Today, Kyle remains an active alum, participating in six capstone projects through UC Irvine's ICS Capstone industry program. Eatery's team today is Kyle Sanders and Julian Sotelo.

How Eatery Is Different From Yelp and MyFitnessPal

Yelp is a review-based platform built on user-generated content, used by many for eating out. MyFitnessPal is a nutrition-logging app used mostly for at-home eating. Eatery combines the experience of both — simplifying nutrition tracking into goal-based search, for eating out only.

What's Next

If Eatery works, Kyle hopes to use it to grow businesses and improve the experience people have when dining out — for both budget and nutrition — and to reopen Toko Rame someday.