Tweet a Food Emoji at Fooji and Get a Real Meal Delivered

The company launches in June.

Are emojis the future of food ordering? Earlier this month, Domino's launched a (questionably successful) system that allows customers to tweet a pizza emoji at the brand and have a pizza delivered to their door. Now, there is a start-up called Fooji that will deliver a meal based off of any food emoji a customer tweets.

The company was founded by style advice app WeStyle employees Gregg Morton and Erik Zamudio after they spent nearly an hour trying to figure out where to order sandwiches from for lunch. The duo felt that there were too many options, which made the decision difficult and time consuming. Zamudio tells Eater that the pair started joking about "how nice it would be if we could just send one tweet, one emoji, and get the food we wanted." And thus Fooji was born.

Is emoji the future of food delivery?

To use Fooji — an amalgam of "food" and "emoji" — customers have to create an account linked to their Twitter handle. After that, all they have to do is tweet a food emoji representing what item they want for a meal (i.e. a burger, pizza, ramen) and Fooji will "handle the rest." This means they will select a local restaurant that serves the type of food requested, will pick an option that matches the emoji, and have it delivered to the customer's door. Zamudio notes, "Since there is no description included in the tweet, we pick a meal from a top rated local restaurant to represent an emoji once a week. We like to boast that we're an adventurous foodie's dream."

The company's website reveals that all meals cost $15 and customers have no control over where the meal will be ordered from. There is also no way to request preferences — such as no pickles — for an order, even if a customer is allergic to certain foods.

Ordering options with Fooji are limited to the official food emojis that are currently available. However, the options are set to expand. Last week, Unicode — the consortium of developers and designers responsible for emojis — announced that 38 new emojis will launch next year, including food emojis like avocado, bacon, and a croissant. Fooji is set to launch in June in New York City, and plans to expand to other cities as soon as possible.

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