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The Future of Dining Business: Restaurant NFTs

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Restaurants, although various historical records state differently, have been first recorded from around 1100 A.D. in China, the year of 803 in Salzburg, Austria, or from the 16th century in America. Ever since then, it has become a worldwide culture to always enjoy a meal outside of home. Whilst there are different types of restaurants, like fast-food chains and private dining experiences, most serve the same purpose. Feed the hungry, taste-curious customers and profit from it. 

Despite food being known to people as it is for centuries now, the idea of revolutionizing the experiences around it is always adapting. We are familiar with fast-food chains introducing toys with meals to attract younger customers, celebrity chefs opening their restaurants to attract customers for their status or having dinner with strangers on a table suspended 100 ft in the air. But now innovative restaurants are opening with the idea of further freshening up how customers interact with the establishments and their food. They are opening new profit revenues and attracting customers from various backgrounds and interests, all thanks to NFTs and the new model of Restaurant NFTs.  

Introduction to NFTs: Yum or Yuck?

NFTs are far more different than food, or restaurant for that matter. Whilst you have to pay for both, you can only eat food, and NFTs stay on the web. However, NFTs can be beneficial in the long run (and they are pretty to look at).  

NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token which represents assets like art, virtual estate, music, videos, memberships and many more and upcoming intangible assets. NFTs are based on a blockchain, meaning a decentralized public ledger on which all transactions and records are visible to the public, which in return is very secure. They are also given certificates and metadata attached to the actual artwork and thus convert to NFTs, which can be sold on the market for various reasons. There are numerous benefitions owning an NFT or launching an NFT collection. 

Benefits of NFTs for a Business
Benefits of incorporating NFTs in a business
Benefits of NFTs for a Business (mobile)
Benefits of incorporating NFTs in a business

The benefits of implementing NFTs in your business are monumental. Not only are you showing your competitors, investors and customers that you hahe progressive and ambitious minds, but you are also introducing more products to your customers. A wider range of products means more sales and income. NFTs are based online on a blockchain, he access to them requires technical/internet knowledge and skills. This translates to a worldwide audience of tech-savvy and NFT-interested investors, who are more likely to notice your company through NFTs. Additionally, this system is very transparent and secure and because NFTs can also have royalties, you can decide a percentage to receive through any additional resales of your NFTs. 

With those benefits, we’d say NFTs aly Yum! But you’ve just read about food and restaurants, and now NFTs are being mentioned. You might be thinking, where’s the cohesion? Let us explain. 

Restaurant NFTs Explained

A restaurant NFT is still a new concept but with the never-ending hype around NFTs, it’s surely going to see a profitable future. Restaurant NFTs can be themed around crypto or NFTs, accept crypto/NFT payments or sell NFTs as a form of membership or other benefits. One such restaurant defines the true restaurant NFT meaning and can use all of the above-mentioned benefits purely by introducing NFTs into its business strategy.  

There are various restaurants which use NFTs differently, and that’s important in such an age where your idea and restaurant can be the first of them all to introduce the concept that stands out. These examples of trial and error are going to be perfect foe future entrepreneurs wanting to expand their business. 

How Businesses Use NFTs to Grow Their Dining Business

Thinking about how your business can grow through NFTs in dining industry and to keep it continuously growing is fundamental for your strategy. While NFTs are a great strategy for that, they can seem hard to grasp and get on with. Usually, an NFT agency can provide your business with a range of services which are essential for your success. NFT collections can contain just a couple of NFTs or, like most big and popular collections, they can consist of 10,000 NFTs.  

Different ways that businesses use NFTs
The Different Ways Businesses Use NFTs
Different ways that businesses use NFTs (mobile)
The Different Ways Businesses Use NFTs

Having a bigger NFT collection is most likely to secure a great return on investment (ROI) because the initial cost to produce your collection can be reimbursed with just a couple of NFTs. These collections are your playground, and you can not only define what they represent, but also how they represent it and how often that representation appears on particular NFTs. In short, you can have basic, common and rare NFT types, one costing more than the other. If you’re ready to get those benefits of NFTs for your business and want a professional NFT agency to help you from A to Z, then the professional and experienced team behind DigitalArtists is your best shot. With an NFT agency to help you with your marketing and business strategies, you can have a wide range of products available. Now, let’s look at the different types of dining NFTs restaurants use to grow their businesses. 

Food Art NFTs

Given that NFTs created a boom within the art world, creating a hype around big NFT collections, it comes as no surprise that food too can be turned into art collections. Many big brands saw potential in this way to grow their businesses and launched their own branded NFT collections. 

Big chains like McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King Đ°nd Taco Bell all released NFTs of their food menu offerings to raise funds for various reasons. Needless to say, such big chains have had a huge customer base for years and the idea to generate additional revenue streams through NFT has definitely been an easy and smart decision.  

NFT Recipes

Looking up a recipe in a cookbook, asking a friend or just looking it up on the web is the usual way people would look for recipes. In the future, some suggest that NFTs can overtake that tradition and introduce a new way to provide never-before-seen recipes. 

Celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito was part of the 2021 Oscars unique gifters. Nominess would receive different packs, rewards and NFTs, but DiSpirito was responsible for the nominated directors. Each of them would receive a shared unique recipe made specifically by the celebrity chef and accompanied by unique visuals of the ingredients and their colours. The winning director however would receive another recipe created by DiSpirito based on three ingredients chosen by the director. Again, that winner NFT would be accompanied by stunning graphics and even music, which is meant to be enjoyed while cooking the actual dish. 

Digital Dining Experiences

Digital dining experiences are overtaking social media constantly, recommending tourists where to go for a local and immersive experience. This is the experience that is not necessarily delivered through your computer’s web browser, but one that implements digital features in a traditional physical environment (visuals and projections, music, interactive devices). 

There are restaurants all over the world which look out for their customers to provide them more than just a dining experience. A restaurant in Paris offers interactive projections on the tables with characters building their dish, which is then served in a perfect timely manner to deliver the illusion as if the characters had made it. Or London’s restaurants which have table projections enabling menu scrolling and ordering direct from the table and then interactive games between friends during dinner.  

NFT Memberships

Businesses, especially restaurants, can profit from NFTs not only by releasing collections but by further offering memberships through them. Many of the most famous NFT art collections started this trend indirectly. Any NFT buyer receives perks – which in a way are a membership to the organizers’ community. They are added to a Discord channel, get invited to festivals and receive merch – all because they had supported the NFT collection by buying into it. 

How does that translate into the restaurant industry? Well, there already are some restaurants only available to NFT buyers, discussed in the examples below, and they offer different tiers of memberships. A lower-tier membership gets you in the standard dining rooms with the standard menu – all whilst being quite premium, reflecting on the prices of the memberships. The higher-tier memberships include all standard perks and more premium dining rooms and menus with a bigger range of products. This is the way to implement memberships into your restaurant to create a unique experience for your customers. 

Charity and Social Causes

Fundraising through NFTs for charities and social causes has never been easier and if there ever is a time to start doing that, then that would be now. Traditional fundraising is most often promoted through traditional means, newspapers, word of mouth, local ads and at most some social media. This results in only local and physical fundraising possible for the organization. Why not introduce NFTs as a mean to raise funds? This will bring in people from across the world, of different age-ranges and financial backgrounds. While the fundraising campaign can rely on traditional means to raise funds, NFTs can be a brilliant secondary revenue stream to add to the strategy. 

NFT Themed Restaurant

Having a restaurant NFT is another secure way to attract the NFT community for business purposes. The NFT community usually either is connected to or partly the same as the cryptocurrency community. Both go hand in hand with the development of the future of Web3. Giving people a place themed as their favourite cryptocurrency, a place where they can also freely spend that currency is going to be welcomed by the community and an incentive to explore future investments, be it into the business or the currency itself.  

But other places jump straight at the opportunity to base their whole restaurant around an NFT collection. NFTs offer numerous benefits for restaurants and the dining industry. Not only will they attract NFT holders, but they can introduce holders-only events and offer them different perks like discounts. Some exact examples of these below. 

The Best NFT Use Cases in Dining

The journey of NFTs has been truly remarkable. Since their launch in 2014 as a concept of securely proving ownership over art, to their revolutionizing the digital market in 2021, the opportunities are endless. We’ve talked about the benefits of having NFTs in your business, NFTs in any restaurant business and the ways these are implemented. Let’s now look through the best NFT use cases in dining which have successfully leveraged these strategies for profit. 

Flyfish Club

The world’s first restaurant NFT is New York’s Flyfish Club, founded by the (crypto) entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and his hospitality company VCR Group. The private dining club comes with two different types of memberships. These memberships offer private dining experiences and premium culinary.  

The Flyfish Club memberships can be bought as NFTs and are named Flyfish and Flyfish Omakase. The Flyfish restaurant NFT membership includes access to a cocktail lounge, restaurant, outdoor space and private events. This membership can be bought for the price of 2.5 ETH (currently around 4170 USD). The Flyfish Omakase membership includes all standard benefits plus access to a private Omakase room. This elevated membership costs 4.25 ETH (currently around 7100 USD). The first restaurant NFT also has a star sushi chef to cook up mesmerizing fish meals and sushi. Not included are the prices for drinks and food, which can be paid for using Fiat currencies. 

Bored & Hungry

And then there’s the Bored & Hungry restaurant to solidify the restaurant NFT meaning. This one is purely influenced by one of the biggest and most successful NFT collections, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. This NFT collection consists of 10,000 NFTs, only 9,998 of which were sold to 5,574 owners, and has a market value of $416,827,022. NFT owners of BAYC receive access to an online private club, merchandise and exclusive in-person events, which often feature stars like Snoop Dogg, who also is a BAYC NFT owner.  

he Bored and Hungry restaurant owner, Andy Nguyen, is a professional restauranteur and saw the potential in NFTs and, more specifically, in the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. Hence why he created the Bored and Hungry as a pop-up, investing around $300,000, but soon after opening, the restaurant became an instant hit and has since stayed a proper NFT-themed restaurant in Long Beach, California, USA. There is slime illustrated on the restaurant’s windows, allegedly to represent one of the BAYC collections, the products are served with BAYC-themed packaging and overall, it acts as a portal into the BAYC universe.

Crypto Street Restaurant

The owner of the Crypto Street Restaurant is Ricardo Varona who decided to open the restaurant in Clearwater Beach, Florida, because of the opportunities cryptocurrencies offer. His son had talked to him about the Web3 innovations for years, despite Varona ignoring it. Then, he was convinced that he should have listened while his small restaurant was being visited by a lot of (returning) customers. Because of its location at the time on the ground floor of a hotel, there were a lot of tourists going in and out to check out the sensation. 

Clients were happy to be served an American and Hispanic menu, to have crypto-related decorations and the ability to pay with Dogecoin. Varona said he has helped customers set OpenSea accounts, an NFT marketplace, and has had numerous crypto and NFT-related conversations with customers. On 2nd March 2023, the Crypto Street Restaurant posted on Twitter that they are “no longer able to keep the restaurant running currently”, meaning this might be the end of this very ambitious restaurant. 

Welly

Another dog-inspired coin, the Shiba Inu Coin, is the inspiration behind Welly’s rebranding. After a collaboration with the coin, Welly, located in Naples, Italy, rebranded fully to incorporate the coin’s logo and values. As a small outlet, customers can walk up to it and order fast food but also vegan and healthy options like burgers, fries and drinks.  

They also launched an NFT collection to help the growth of the outlet and their goal is to inspire the community to adopt a healthier and longer lasting lifestyle through the blockchain technology and healthy dining. NFT holders are also provided with rewards, events and opportunities for wellness and self-care. 

Burger Boy

The Burger Boy is one of the greatest NFT use cases in dining. This is unlike any other restaurant NFT project, because yes, they will deliver burgers, but no, not directly from their restaurant. Instead, the founders, Brad Miller and Luke Tabit, will be relying on ghost kitchens. These are usually kitchens in warehouses that know the recipes and once ordered, can quickly cook the food and have it shipped out to the customer. This is a concept that Miller believes in to be smart and highly profitable because one doesn’t have to invest in physical locations. The burgers can also be ordered online through virtual reality which is a great way to expand to untraditional means of interaction. 

The NFT collection, made of 3,333 NFTs, sold out in just under a minute. The NFTs depict characters holding burgers, with different backgrounds and elements (and some even have the tattoos of their creators). NFT holders will have access to exclusive perks both in real life and online with creators hoping to raise enough funds for gatherings with DJs and free burgers.  

Conclusion: NFTs Are Changing the Dining Experience

From benefits to examples, this article has covered exactly why and how the NFTs in the dining industry are helping restaurants with changing the overall dining experience as we all know and love it. This developing Web3 technology is an innovative way to market your business, reach more people, raise more funds and all that whilst being transparent and very secure doing it. It’s maybe impossible to think of more ways to introduce NFTs in restaurant businesses, but a while back, surely, not many would have deemed the examples mentioned above as possible. Restaurant NFTs like these examples exist because of the potential that NFTs have and have been proven to work.  

Frequently Asked Questions

We wish we could give you a foody NFT or even a juicy burger, but for now, all we can offer are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions on the topic of Restaurant NFT:

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