Booky

Booky began in 2014 as a mobile restaurant directory built by Ben Wintle and his wife, actress Iza Calzado, to solve their own problem of finding updated restaurant menus and deciding where to eat in Metro Manila. The app later pivoted toward discount vouchers, freebies, and buy-one-get-one promos at partner restaurants, which drove it to become the Philippines’ top food-and-beverage app by 2019.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down dine-in restaurants, Booky pivoted again, building a white-label QR-based Digital Ordering System (DOS) for restaurants to keep taking orders through lockdowns. As restrictions eased, the company shifted back to its core strength of restaurant discovery and deals.

Booky has since relaunched around Booky Prime, a subscription product (reported at around PHP 149/month at relaunch) offering access to hundreds of deals across thousands of partner restaurants, and remains an active, operating company in the Philippine food-tech space as of the mid-2020s.

Filipino diners lacked an easy way to discover restaurants, see current menus, and find deals, especially as Metro Manila's food-and-beverage scene grew faster than word-of-mouth or print guides could track; a version of the same discovery problem returned when the pandemic forced a sudden shift to delivery and digital ordering.

Filipino diners looking for restaurant discovery, menus, and deals, plus restaurant partners seeking discount-driven customer acquisition and, during the pandemic, digital ordering infrastructure.

Repeatedly reinvented its core product to match the moment: from a menu directory, to the country's top F&B deals app by 2019, to a pandemic-era white-label digital ordering system, and back to a subscription deals model (Booky Prime) post-pandemic, rather than folding when its original model became less viable.