The fake food site that never delivers

FoodNeverComes lets you browse 22 cuisines, add dishes to your cart and checkout. A dummy AI caller says the rider is outside. But no food ever arrives.

“The food never comes - but the dopamine does.”

Built by two twenty-six-year-olds

Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma, software developers from Udaipur in Rajasthan, launched FoodNeverComes in June. It has attracted more than two point seven million visitors.

Twenty-two fake kitchens, three hundred twenty-seven dishes

FoodNeverComes offers twenty-two kitchens, three hundred twenty-seven dishes and three hundred nineteen real recipes, complete with fake prices, simulated checkout and fictional delivery experience.

A new internet genre emerges

Dopamine sites recreate the rituals of consumption without the consumption. The genre took off in South Korea and has since spawned sites like Dopamine Shop and Fakehaul.

The founders noticed their own habits

Parmar and Sharma met on a computer science diploma course. They noticed online baskets filling up with things they wanted but never bought. Sharma would browse electronics and abandon carts.

Parmar's expensive food delivery habit

During a two-month project in Mumbai, Parmar spent five thousand to ten thousand rupees a week on food delivery, ordering treats he did not necessarily need like Belgian waffles and ice cream.

The craving was for the ritual

Parmar believes the real craving was not always for the food, but for the ritual of ordering it. Boredom, anxiety or habit can trigger the urge even when hunger has disappeared.

“Sometimes you're not hungry at all. You're bored or busy, and then you realise that ordering food makes you feel good.”

Anticipation can beat the actual thing

Ravi Dhar, director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights, calls this anticipatory utility. The thrill is in the chase. Once acquired, psychological arousal falls.

“The thrill is in the chase.”

Dopamine is not just pleasure

Kent Berridge, a University of Michigan neuroscientist, says wanting and liking are separate processes. Dopamine drives wanting, the motivational pull towards something, not the pleasure of having it.

Ritual itself becomes reinforcing

Dr Anna Lembke, a Stanford addiction psychiatrist, says cues and habits attached to a reward become reinforcing in their own right. Anticipation of reward can be as reinforcing as the reward itself.

“Anticipation of reward can be as reinforcing as the reward itself.”

The danger: rehearsing the behaviour

The ritual may simply rehearse the behaviour it is supposed to replace. Lembke says the sites could reinforce the same addictive neural networks they are trying to simulate over time.

A second site: fake holidays

TripNeverLeaves lets users plan a holiday, choose destination, flight, seat and hotel, then sends them on a virtual flight that never leaves the runway. It has attracted more than one hundred thousand visitors.

The bigger question about consumption

If so much of the thrill comes before we get the thing, do we need the thing at all? The sites have stumbled into a question about modern consumption and what we actually want.