Meituan, the parent company of DianPing (often called “China’s Yelp”), has quietly launched a new food rating app called Duck Finding Food.
Screenshot of the app’s logo, UI, recommendation policies. The app is still very beta — currently only available in Beijing.
At its core, the app is for finding good places to eat. What makes it interesting is its ambition: 100% ad-free, bot-free, and purely based on authentic recommendations.
Instead of open crowdsourced reviews, the app uses Golden Spoon ratings given by verified recommenders. These aren’t random scores:
- Taste-first approach – Ratings are based almost entirely on food quality, with three levels: 3 spoons (“worth a special trip”), 2 spoons (“worth going out of your way”), and 1 spoon (“worth stopping by if nearby”).
- Weighted by expertise – A recommender’s influence in each food category affects how much their rating counts. Someone known for great noodle picks will have more say in noodle shop rankings.
- Strict authenticity checks – Accounts caught doing hidden paid promotion get their influence reset to zero, and the system is regularly audited to prevent gaming.
This design tries to combine curation with trust — though whether it can hold up at scale is another story. For example, rating inflation?
Right now, recommenders are rewarded with coupons. Whether this model can sustain itself is an open question. The bigger challenge, though, is whether the ideal of a truly authentic rating platform can survive in the long run. Once user numbers grow, manual monitoring becomes nearly impossible — and history shows that the pull of “sponsored” reviews disguised as genuine is relentless. Restaurants, driven by revenue and competition, will always have strong incentives to game the system.
Still, it’s an experiment worth watching.