Beli: A Recipe for Revenue
By: Owen Hu & Isabella Pan
The Ivey Business Review is a student publication conceived, designed and managed by Honors Business Administration students at the Ivey Business School.
Beli: Building a Community Around Taste
Since its release in 2021, Beli has grown to be one of the hottest niche social media platforms, attracting diners looking to keep track of, share, and discover restaurants around the world. Founded by Harvard Business School grads Judith and Eliot Frost, Beli has utilized classic gamification features and grown primarily through word-of-mouth referrals, particularly attracting a Gen Z audience. Since its launch, Beli’s referral-powered growth has generated a vast data repository of over 75 million restaurant ratings, already rivalingYelp’s 83.6 million over the same period of time.
Beli works by helping users keep score of every restaurant, bar, bakery, café, and dessert spot they visit. Unlike other review sites that rely on star ratings, Beli prompts users to compare each spot with a previously ranked spot. Through repeated comparisons, the app then determines a personalized score out of ten points. By sharing each visit with their Beli feed, users can discover where their friends have been enjoying, and Beli can suggest personalized recommendations based on past taste preferences. This review-rank-recommend process repeats with each new entry, creating a feedback loop that unlocks better aligned recommendations for users. With a primarily Gen Z user base (80% of users are under 35), Beli functions as a personal food journal where users document their unique culinary footprint, whether dining both alone and with friends.
As such, central to Beli’s success is its focus on building not just a platform but a whole community around food and discovering new restaurants and cuisines. With over 80% of users joining the app through referrals—which naturally self-selects the most dedicated “foodies” onto the platform—and weekly streak-based ranking systems, the Beli community has provided high-quality reviews to numerous restaurants. Although Beli has experimented with user-generated ratings and comments to create simple community-aggregated rankings, such as sharing a “Top 25 Toronto Restaurants” list to encourage users to try new spots, there remains a lot of untapped potential with its user data. Moreover, Beli has also experimented with the Beli Supper Club, an exclusive subscription service that connects members for intimate social dining experiences. However, the Beli Supper Club is only in New York City, leaving a lot of opportunity for its future expansion.
The Missing Ingredient: the Revenue Problem
It is common for an early-stage startup to be unprofitable, but Beli lacks a coherent revenue model to sustain its fast-growing user base. Although Beli has partnered with OpenTable and SevenRooms and launched a paid supper club, they are insufficient revenue sources to meaningfully expand Beli’s lean eight-person team. A larger, more technical team is necessary to improve the app’s quality, from fixing the buggy UI to fine-tuning the recommendations algorithm. Obtaining capital is the imperative first step.
The obvious strategy is starting an ad program. However, the founders have explicitly stated their opposition to in-feed ads, believing they would compromise the integrity of the platform, especially the recommendations feature. That being said, there remains opportunity in Beli’s vast repository of consumer data. What makes the platform’s data so valuable is its authenticity: Beli users are engaged and honest. Google Reviews are skewed by restaurant promotions that aim to boost their ratings, while Yelp reviews have increasingly shifted toward polarization as users post to inform others. In contrast, Beli users post for themselves, eliminating external factors that influence the quality of reviews. In a world driven by data, quantity is plentiful while quality is scarce.
The Appetite for Beli’s Data
Beli’s largest and most unique asset is its extensive collection of high-quality data. With this, we recommend the creation of a Beli Insights Suite, acting as a CRM analytics platform for restaurants to make data-informed decisions about their menu, pricing, and expansion. This platform would target restaurant groups and chains, as well as tech food partners like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
Beli’s foodie-curated data holds a key competitive advantage over existing data sources used by restaurants and analytics platforms. Unlike alternatives such as Google Reviews or Yelp, where restaurants are known to run incentive programs that inflate five-star reviews, Beli users’ reviews are uniquely authentic. A large part of this is how Beli’s ad-free, journal-like platform encourages users to review for themselves rather than for discounts or social approval, promoting honesty and straddling a distinct middle ground between the average diner and professional food critic. Another part stems from how the app grew through an exclusive referral account creation structure, self-selecting dedicated foodies onto the platform to create higher quality data.
A comparable model exists in the movie-review space: Letterboxd, a platform for film enthusiasts to track movies, has become increasingly appreciated by industry insiders and filmmakers to understand user-curated feedback and audience sentiment. Clearly, industries value data from user sources that are passionate and informed, but also unprompted and authentic. Beli’s authentic data gives it a similar advantage, enabling monetization through paid analytics. Beli’s Insight Suite would benefit restaurants in two ways: macro trends and restaurant-specific insights.
At the macro level, Beli will be able to aggregate data across pricing tiers, locations, and cuisines to summarize key insights. Insights like “Korean cuisine is up 12% in South London this month” or “shareable appetizers are gaining traction among Gen Z diners”, will allow restaurants to better assess market potential and make menu adjustments as necessary. Moreover, restaurants will be able to make more data-driven site selection and promotion strategies; for example, Chipotle would be able to analyze Mexican fast casual trends in a neighbourhood as part of their site viability process.
At the restaurant level, this Insights Suite will also help individual locations understand how they have performed over time. With Beli’s higher-quality reviews and the app encouraging repeat rankings, restaurants will be able to track comparable control groups and changes in performance. They would then gain insights into the appeal of specific dishes—for example, “the noodles were ordered 15% less this month and commonly rated as too salty”—as well as the holistic dining experience. Beli already runs its annual “Plated” campaign and monthly recaps showing users qualitative insights into their dining habits, proving the feasibility of translating subjective reviews into structured data summaries. As such, scaling these insights to restaurants is not a total rebuild of Beli’s back-end infrastructure but rather a logical next step in monetization.
Finally, delivery partners such as Uber Eats and DoorDash would greatly benefit from Beli’s data. In November 2025, DoorDash released its first-ever State of Local Commerce report analyzing hundreds of millions of transactions across restaurants and the associated macro trends of the year, a clear indicator of market validation and the appetite for restaurant data analytics. Beli’s qualitative data would greatly complement these transactional datasets, revealing the underlying consumer sentiment and the “why” behind consumer behaviour that the purely transactional data cannot capture.
The recurring nature of insights and longitudinal data from repeat customers would allow Beli to charge a subscription model. Monetization through data is thus both highly scalable and aligned with Beli’s core value of keeping the platform ad-free, all while improving restaurant relationships and being community-driven.
Lessons From Beyond the Kitchen: Existing Analytics Solutions
Why would restaurants pay for data analytics software? Though they typically operate on low margins, with average margins ranging from 17% for quick-service to only 5% for full-service locations, restaurants have consistently demonstrated their willingness to pay for data-driven solutions. Toast is a cloud-based restaurant software company with users like TGI Fridays and Applebee’s. Its analytics add-on, Toast Web, collects data directly from point of sale (POS) systems—providing sales reports (e.g. sales by location, time), menu reports (e.g. best performing items), and guest reports (e.g. customer loyalty features) in one platform. In its second quarter of 2025, Toast reported a 24% year-over-year increase in clients to 148,000, showing restaurants’ clear demand for analytics. The data collected from these POS systems then become restaurants’ secret ingredient, with restaurants using data analytics seeing a 15% revenue boost on average. The evidence is clear: data visibility leads to smarter decisions that drive performance.
The next frontier is turning qualitative dining data into similarly actionable insights. Toast—which only collects data from POS systems—is inherently limited to capturing transactional data; that is, what sells and how much. Beli instead captures the experiential factors of dining and highlights the qualitative distinctions on why items sell. The benefits are threefold. First, restaurants can better replicate winning strategies: if Qdoba’s protein bowl sells well and Beli shows that this is due to the bowl’s delicate flavour balance and portion size, Qdoba can apply this insight to other menu items. Second, understanding the reasons behind customer behaviour allows for smarter decision making. Toast may show a 10% drop in sales in October, but it is unable to pinpoint if the issue is due to a decline in food quality, service, or enjoyment. Beli’s qualitative feedback can identify the true cause, allowing the restaurant to respond accurately rather than relying on guesswork. Finally, this valuable qualitative data enables Beli to create more authentic marketing campaigns by appealing to the emotional factor of dining. For example, if customers rate the entertaining atmosphere of Haidilao as a highlight, the chain can emphasize this in future promotions and storytelling.
In short, restaurants and operators are willing to pay for actionable insights, but existing solutions rely on internal data points rather than user-generated insights. While today’s solutions stop at what sells, Beli adds the missing ingredient: showing why customers dine and return.
From Beli Users to Beli Diners: Building Community Offline
Beli’s highly passionate user base is another valuable asset. Currently, users engage with each other by liking and commenting on ratings and following their favourite food influencers. The community feels intimate—it is simply a group of people bonded by a shared interest in food. The majority of users being based in major cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco presents the perfect opportunity to replicate these intimate communities in real life. Users could purchase paid “Beli Insider” memberships to access exclusive dining experiences, whether that is claiming a spot at the city’s hottest new restaurant’s opening night or receiving an invitation to the influencer pop-up event around the corner. The membership would build upon the foundation set by the existing Beli Supper Club and allow users to unlock even more experiential features. This strategy is two pronged: not only is it a recurring revenue source, it also makes existing users stickier by integrating Beli into multiple aspects of their life.
Recently, Beli has started hosting ticketed social events at restaurants, such as the Beli Halloween Party held in partnership with Cariñito Tacos. While these events do bring users together, they are treated more as one-off marketing initiatives as opposed to a recurring revenue stream. They resemble the rising “soft clubbing” trend, where social gatherings emphasize user mingling rather than the substance of the activity itself. This direction is misaligned with Beli’s core mission of bringing users to what they care about most: great food.
Thus, the Beli Insider membership should bring users exclusive experiences that can fall into three categories: exploring, creating, and sharing. “Exploring” experiences would provide members with the opportunity to try new cuisines and dining options in more intimate and elevated settings. This would include invitations to high-profile restaurant openings, intimate chef’s table experiences where diners interact directly with the chef, and menu preview nights where members get the first taste of a new seasonal or experimental menu before its launch. At “Creating” events, members can take small-group cooking classes from experienced chefs for a more interactive experience. Through partnering with cooking schools and independent instructors, Beli would be able to offer the experience at a discounted price, as long as the user has a paid membership. Lastly, “Sharing” events would benefit not only members, but also restaurant owners. Similar to the Beli Insights Suite, Beli can act as the middleman between restaurateurs and diners by organizing experiential feedback experiences, bringing users one step closer to the restaurant industry. For example, if a restaurant was deciding between two different new appetizers, members can attend a live tasting at a discount and in return offer structured, high-quality feedback. All three types of experiences can be sorted into different Beli Insider membership levels with differing levels of exclusivity.
The Beli Insider membership builds directly on the app’s core value of community. Much like with Letterboxd, where cinephiles are happy to pay a subscription just to support the app’s community and development, Beli can harness this unique loyalty in expanding its Supper Club feature into the experiential Beli Insider membership. Whereas the Supper Club solely focuses on organizing dining events at different restaurants, the Beli Insider membership hones in on the upscale dining category, providing members with unique, unreplicable experiences. In doing so, this subscription evolves the Supper Club’s foundation of community dining into a scalable model across more geographies, deepening the dining experiences users receive.
Beli’s Next Course
Beli’s next biggest challenge will be converting its highly valuable repository of data and loyal user base into a monetizable strategy. By adopting a dual monetization plan—pairing a business Insights Suite with a direct-to-customer membership subscription—Beli will be able to best achieve that vision, furthering its core value of building and bettering a social community through food.
In practice, Beli’s data strategy could start with a pilot program involving a small group of restaurants to test the power of its feedback loop—where more reviews lead to stronger insights. Over time, this could expand to include more advanced tools, such as sentiment analysis of qualitative data. In parallel, Beli could gradually roll out the Beli Insider membership, slowly integrating more features and starting in select cities where its current users are based to gauge demand. With this dual-track monetization strategy in place, Beli will leave both customers and investors wanting seconds.
Editor(s): Harvey Zhu
Researcher(s): George Xie
