SEATTLE — The Bite of Seattle has left a bitter taste in the mouths of some vendors and foodies alike.
It was a little over a week ago that thousands of people gathered in Seattle Center for the return of Bite of Seattle. This year if you wanted food you had to order through a phone app called CHEQ — a company based in Kirkland — but the app didn’t satisfy some appetites.
“The ordering system made our lives a little more difficult than it needed to be,” said Grayson Corrales, owner of Maripili Tapas in Seattle.
KIRO 7 Also spoke to Phillip Crowder, who is part owner of Hatch Cantina in Belltown and he, too, wondered about why the app did not perform well for many people.
“Cheq did not have a lot of lead time to build this app beforehand,” said Crowder.
Crowder and Corrales were among the vendors who welcomed the return of Bite of Seattle as a chance to reconnect after the food festival was scuttled for several years due to COVID-19 closures and restrictions. Some vendors even said that ordering exclusively via the app didn’t work.
Corrales says she built her restaurant on human interaction. She says her service doesn’t use QR codes and has paper menus, and the CHEQ app got in the way of the service experience.
“It felt like there was definitely a layer of tech that was kind of interfering or obstructing,” said Corrales.
Crowder says there was some technical support staff on the ground during the festival to help people with the app, but he also admitted that people and vendors struggled at times.
“It was definitely hard on a lot of people both the vendors and the guests, thankfully they had a lot of people milling around trying to troubleshoot the app,” said Crowder.
It appears CHEQ bit off more than it could chew with Bite of Seattle. The vendors we spoke with admitted that people who didn’t have the app couldn’t order easily, and others who didn’t have phones couldn’t order food at all.
Bite of Seattle acknowledged some of the difficulties on Facebook saying:
CHEQ announced earlier this year that it would produce Bite of Seattle, a move that may have saved the festival. Crowder says the company behind the app needs to let people use cash or cards instead of just CHEQ and create flexibility for everyone.
“I think they definitely need to look at how the app was functioning and listen to the feedback that was given,” said Crowder.
Corrales admits that her restaurant is fairly new and that going to the festival was a huge expense to the tune of thousands of dollars. She also says CHEQ took a cut of each restaurant’s earnings at the festival, even though the app proved to be a problem at times. Corrales wonders if she will return next year but also said there needs to be flexibility.
“I would appreciate it if there was a little more accessibility for next year’s event. We as a restaurant really focus on connection and it was hard to take a step back,” she said.
Since the Bite of Seattle will likely be back here next year, vendors will likely see the problems persist if nothing is done.
We did reach out to CHEQ but did not get a response.