TikTok has fired the latest shot in the social mapping wars. After several moves to plant a flag in mapping and local search (more on those in a bit), this week it launched a restaurant guide. Known as Must Eat, it offers a formal destination in its app for users to discover new and nearby restaurants.
The new feature will be positioned as a community-driven guide that surfaces restaurants that are trending on TikTok. This makes it a formalized destination that corrals restaurant-related content that’s already happening across the app, such as videos shot about, in, or around a given restaurant.
This structure follows TikTok’s common playbook in launching new features. For example, TikTok Shop was similar initially in that it was a place in the app that pulled in all the products being featured in TikTok videos. Then it added a taxonomy so products could be tagged and then pulled into Shop at scale.
For Must Eat, TikTok crawls more than 40 million posts for content about local restaurants. These all flow into the Must Eat section and then materialize in recommendations and curated lists that help users discover restaurants. Individual restaurants also have listings with details and recommendations.
Contexts & Vibes
From the user perspective, Must Eat offers both browse and search use cases. The former is good for restaurant discovery, such as the curated lists noted above. The latter lets users who want something specific to filter listings and recommendations by location, cuisine, price, and ratings.
To further curate the experience, Must Eat also splits its recommendations into two main categories: Everyday Eats and Elevated Dining, which are self-explanatory. We expect more categories to come, meant to help users discover various contexts and vibes (think: happy hour, kids’ parties, etc.).
Lastly, TikTok isn’t just pointing users towards local restaurants but helping them book. Through an integration with OpenTable users can book reservations without leaving the app. This tells us that there could be some monetization behind this move – or coming soon – for sponsored listings.
Meanwhile, Must Eat is launching first in New York, LA and San Francisco. The feature can be found in a few prominent places in the TikTok app, including the search bar, the Local Feed, individual restaurant pages, and location links that rest under some videos, if a restaurant happens to be tagged.
Social Layer
Back to TikTok’s playbook, Must Eat leans into existing behavior on TikTok and structures it to be a standalone feature. This builds on the fact that TikTok over the past half-decade has been a surprise tool for Gen-Z to search for and discover local businesses. TikTok continues to lean into that behavior.
That brings us to the other local search and mapping moves that were teased above. Before Must Eat, TikTok has blitzed features such as its Nearby Feed. Similar to Snap Map and Instagram Map, it’s all about attracting users to a local discovery tool that offers the additional layer of social relevance.
Practically, that means users can discover things to do and places to go in the context of where friends are, or the places they’ve recommended. This fosters an edge over mapping incumbents such as Google and Apple, which haven’t been able to infuse social relevance (Google has certainly tried).
Back to Must Eat, what’s next? We envision TikTok cultivating other high-value verticals that are mapping-centric. By that, we mean businesses that are destinations and have a social element. Think: less home services and more bars, coffee shops and concert venues. We’ll be watching closely for that.
