How to Cut Your Competitor Research Time by 90%: The Smart Way to do Menu Research on Delivery Apps

Most restaurant owners waste hours and hours every month manually checking competitors on delivery apps when search-based menu intelligence can deliver better results in under 30 minutes.

How much time are restaurants spending on competitor research? It's impossible to tell.

In my experience, if you try and keep track manually, it's at least a full workday every month spent clicking through Talabat profiles, screenshotting Deliveroo menus, and updating spreadsheets with competitor prices.

In the end the reality is that most spend very little time doing menu and competitor research because they just don't have time to do it manually.

It's mentally draining as well.

With nearly 20,000 restaurants and 1.6 million menu items on Talabat alone, the scale of competitor research has become overwhelming for Dubai and Abu Dhabi restaurant owners.

Manual analysis that worked when tracking 5-10 competitors now breaks down when you need to monitor dozens of restaurants across multiple delivery platforms and multiple areas.

Restaurants update their delivery app menu regularly, and prices are also constantly moving up and down. In fact the entire delivery market is in a constant state of flux. It's always changing.

While you're spending hours gathering restaurant competitor analysis data, they're already adjusting to market changes.

Picture this: You run a pizza shop in JVC with multiple competitors nearby. Manually tracking margherita pizza pricing across even a dozen restaurants takes significant time each week.

Now imagine you have 10 different pizzas on your menu. Eeek.

Or you're operating a burger restaurant in Marina where customers compare options across many delivery apps. Understanding your competitive position requires monitoring numerous menu items and pricing strategies.

And I could go on. Clearly this type of data is highly valuable to most food delivery businesses.

It isn't just about research efficiency - it's about making informed pricing decisions that impact restaurant profitability.

Your menu pricing strategy affects your food cost percentage calculations. Price above market rates and customers choose competitors. Price below optimal levels and your restaurant margins suffer.

It's always a balance, and menu research makes it easier to make those decisions.

Your average order value depends on understanding your competitive position. Missing a competitor's promotion or menu change can impact orders before you have a chance to respond.

Successful restaurants in UAE's competitive market, use competitive intelligence tools to maintain awareness of pricing trends, market positioning and to help launch new products.

Why Manual Methods Fail in UAE's Competitive Market

Manual competitor research has always been an option since delivery apps have existed but in today's UAE restaurant market, the size and complexity has outgrown any possibility of doing spreadsheet-based analysis.

Market Dynamics Have Changed

The sheer number of competitors makes manual tracking impossible. In popular Dubai areas, you're not competing against 5-10 restaurants anymore.

Take JVC pizza competition as an example. There are 660 pizza menu items listed on Talabat for restaurants that are located in JVC. This is an extremely large number.

But now consider that many restaurants not located in JVC can also deliver there and you quickly realize how large the task at hand is.

Here's some more crazy numbers for pizza:

In JLT there are 3000+ menu items listed as pizza

Business Bay is also 3000+

In Karama there are 1800 pizza menu items.

So when you compare this to JVC, JVC actually looks reasonably manageable by comparison.

The old approach of checking a few key competitors monthly doesn't work when customers can instantly compare literally thousands of options.

Food delivery platforms update constantly. Restaurants adjust their delivery app pricing and menu items depending on the time of year, often adjusting their offering multiple times based on the season.

By the time you finish manually researching competitor prices, some of that data is already outdated. Promotions launch, combo deals expire, seasonal items get added.

Even if you had unlimited time, the volume of data is overwhelming. Tracking menu changes across multiple restaurants, multiple delivery platforms, and multiple geographic areas creates an impossible workload.

We've already seen just how many pizza items there are.

Now multiply that by every item category you sell. Pizza, pasta, appetizers, drinks, desserts. The math doesn't work.

Impact on Restaurant Profitability

Missing pricing opportunities hits your restaurant margins directly. When competitors adjust their strategy and you don't notice for weeks, customers can drift away.

I know restaurant owners who discovered too late that their signature dish was 15 AED above market rate. By the time they corrected pricing, they'd lost significant market share.

The opposite problem is just as damaging. Price too low because you're working with outdated competitive data, you might just be leaving money on table in a misguided quest for market share.

The Smart Way: Search-Based Menu Intelligence

There's a better approach to restaurant competitor analysis. Instead of clicking through hundreds of profiles manually, or using other filter based products, you can use search-based menu intelligence to find exactly what you need in minutes.

Introduction to Delivery App Menu Search

Think of it like Google for restaurant menus. Instead of browsing through every competitor's profile, you search for specific items across all restaurants and areas at once.

Want to know margherita pizza pricing in JVC? Search for it. Need burger pricing data in Marina? What to see only single items? One search gives you everything.

This isn't just faster - it's more accurate. You're getting comprehensive data instead of the partial picture you get from manual research.

Google Search Syntax for Restaurant Analytics

The secret is using search operators that most people don't know about. These work exactly like Google's advanced search.

AND operator (space): chicken burger finds menu items containing both words in any order.

Exact match (quotes): "combo meal" finds that exact phrase only.

OR operator: "pizza OR pasta" finds items containing either word.

Negation (minus): "burger -combo" finds burgers but excludes combo meals.

This is what makes search based menu research so powerful. You can get extremely specific about what you're looking for instead of drowning in generic results.

In addition you can quickly perform multiple searches as you explore different items and ideas. This is much more useful than a more static approach like using filters where you might not be able to easily remove certain keywords you are not interested in.

Example time!

So let's look at an example of this in action. Let's say you run burger restaurant in JVC and you believe your chicken burger sales are lower than you might expect based on the sales of other menu items.

Let's load up the menu analysis tool and see what we can learn about chicken burgers in JVC.

We'll start with just looking at chicken burgers in the whole market. So we'll do a search for "Chicken Burger" since we want that exact phrase.

We can see across the whole country there are 10,221 total menu items labeled as chicken burger with the average price across all those items coming in at 35 AED.

But bear in mind this is every possible combination of a menu item that could contain chicken burger.

Next we'll narrow down our search to JVC and immediately you can see that there are now just 69 chicken burger items being sold by restaurants in JVC and the average cost is 30.58 AED.

But remember that this is all chicken burger menu items including meal deals and combos. Since we want to know only about single chicken burgers we'll remove combo and meal from the list using the "-" search operator.

Now we've removed the 9 combo and meal items giving us an average price of 28.7 AED for a single chicken burger in JVC.

This is crucial. Without the negative search operator you may have thought the average price for a chicken burger was 30.58 but it's actually well below 30 at 28.7.

Now you can look directly at every item your competing with, see descriptions and investigate prices on the item level.

Advanced Search Strategies

Geographic targeting: Add area names like JVC, Marina, or JLT to your searches to focus on your immediate competition.

Category filtering: Use negation to remove unwanted categories. -combo -meal -kids -family removes bundled items.

Seasonal tracking: Add seasonal terms like "summer" or "ramadan" to track special promotions.

Why Search Beats Filters

There are some other tools currently on the market for doing delivery app menu analysis in the UAE. Obviously I am biased, but I do believe that these have one serious drawback. It's that they are filter based.

In the filter based system you either cannot refine your search to remove things like combos, or the process involves a lot of fiddly manual work with too many clicks.

It's a lot faster to just search for what you want in a similar way you search on Google.

Delivery app menu data is extremely messy so using a rigid system like filters doesn't lead to the most accurate results.

With search, you can include context and it's flexible enough to find relevant items regardless of how restaurants name them.

Plus, you can combine multiple search criteria in ways that rigid filter systems can't handle.

All the use cases for search based menu insights on delivery apps

I've talked about some of these already above but there are many potential uses for this approach that restaurants can benefit from. What's crucial is that you can do a lot of this analysis 10X faster than before.

In search of inspiration? Consider the following ways you can use this tool to improve performance and gain insight at your business.

Based on the search-based menu intelligence feature, here are all the possible use cases I can think of:

Pricing Strategy Use Cases

New menu item pricing research - Before launching a new dish, search average market prices

Existing item price optimization - Regular checks to ensure competitive positioning

Seasonal pricing adjustments - Track how competitors price seasonal items

Promotional pricing benchmarks - See typical discount levels in your market

Bundle vs individual pricing - Compare combo meal strategies across competitors

Menu simplification decisions - Identify low-competition items to potentially remove

Competitive Intelligence Use Cases

New competitor monitoring - Track when new restaurants enter your area

Menu expansion tracking - See when competitors add new categories or items

Promotional campaign monitoring - Spot competitor promotions as they launch

Brand positioning analysis - Understand how competitors describe similar items

Market share estimation - Count competitors offering similar items

Geographic expansion research - Analyze competition before entering new areas

Acquisition target research - Due diligence on potential restaurant purchases

Market Research Use Cases

Customer preference trends - See which items appear most frequently

Emerging food trends - Spot new item categories gaining popularity eg. "Dubai Chocolate".

Market saturation analysis - Determine if a category is oversaturated

Gap identification - Find underserved menu categories or price points

Demand validation - See how many competitors offer similar items

Regional preference mapping - Compare menu differences across Dubai areas

Cultural adaptation research - See how international chains adapt locally

Growth & Scaling Use Cases

Multi-location pricing consistency - Ensure uniform competitive positioning

Franchise development - Provide franchisees with local competitive data

Investor pitch preparation - Demonstrate market understanding and opportunity

Partnership negotiations - Use market data in delivery platform negotiations

The versatility of search - based intelligence makes it valuable for almost every aspect of restaurant operations and strategy.

Wrapping it up

As we have seen, search based menu research is a simple and powerful way to get A LOT of extremely useful data about your restaurant. This insight can drive pricing and menu decisions that can have a genuinely positive impact on business metrics.

I showed one example of using it to find chicken burger menu items in JVC but there are a lot of potential use cases that I have also covered that hopefully provide some inspiration.

The menu analysis tool is part of Revly's delivery app marketing suite which contains campaign management on all the region's top delivery apps, marketing analytics and other types of useful market and competition analysis.

If you'd like to learn more, let us know by filling out your details here.

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