To keep diners engaged and build a habits-forming discovery platform, high-intent real-time content is everything.
Umamii’s mobile app excels at static restaurant discovery, ratings, and menu curation. But diners were missing out on the daily heart of local dining: chef collaborations, limited seasonal tasting menus, pop-up events, and weekend happy hours. Diners had static listings, but restaurants were sharing their best updates in email newsletters that never reached the feed. We needed an automated pipeline and rapid curation system to solve this content cold-start problem.
To bridge the gap between third-party email blasts and our native mobile stream without overloading our team, we mapped out a two-phase architecture focused on admin speed, data isolation, and long-term market intelligence.
Phase 1: Foundation & Admin Velocity
In the foundational phase, our goal was turning raw, unstructured promotional emails into pixel-perfect native feed posts in seconds.
While automated scrapers do the heavy lifting, high-quality curation still requires human oversight. The bottleneck wasn’t getting the data, it was how fast our editorial team could review, refine, and publish it.
Eliminating Editorial Friction
Managing event images and metadata is usually a major operational time-sink. We designed the NewsFeedEditor admin panel specifically to eliminate context-switching and manual steps:
- Built-in Image Framing & Cropping: Managing post assets was historically our biggest operational time sink, forcing admins to open third-party image editors just to format email banners. We built aspect-ratio cropping directly into the workflow, saving minutes per post.
- CTA URL Validator: External newsletter links frequently contain tracking redirects, broken paths, or expired campaign tokens. Our automated CTA link checker verifies destination HTTP status in real time before publishing.
- Instant Restaurant Search: Tagging venues is seamless with an autocomplete search that returns restaurant IDs and vital metadata inline to prevent misattribution.
- Character Counters & Safety Margins: Strict character clamping (max 280 chars) with live visual alerts guarantees summaries stay punchy and never break mobile layouts.
- Side-by-Side Mobile Simulator: Admins curate with a live React Native card simulator running next to the form fields, ensuring 100% visual parity before hitting publish.
Technical & Architectural Decisions
Moving fast required robust data boundaries and bulletproof media delivery. We made three core architectural decisions to safeguard production performance:
- Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite AI Extraction: Incoming raw email HTML is processed through structured prompts to parse event titles, clamped summaries, event dates, categories, and dynamic Call-To-Action buttons (
Reserve Seat,View Menu,Get Tickets). - Safe Image Rehosting Engine: Newsletter images hosted on third-party CDNs frequently expire or fail CORS. Our image endpoint downloads images server-side, validates MIME types, uploads assets to our public Supabase bucket, and rewrites clean URLs.
- Dev-to-Prod Cross-Environment Sync: Running automated scrapers against production risks dirtying user-facing feeds. The ingestion pipeline runs strictly in Development. When an admin approves a post, the backend uses authenticated server-to-server HTTPS calls to replicate sanitized records directly to Production.
Phase 2: Monetization & B2B Intelligence
With the core ingestion and admin engine operational, Phase 2 shifts from internal editorial curation to self-serve partner automation and strategic data insights.
- Self-Serve Partner Submissions: Extending the
NewsFeedEditorcapabilities directly into the Umamii B2B Business Portal so restaurant owners can publish events directly. - Hyper-Local Neighborhood Targeting: Dynamic feed sorting tailored to exact diner geolocation and dietary preferences.
- Competitor & Market Intelligence: By structuring local restaurant event data over time, Umamii aggregates a historical database of industry trends, enabling restaurant partners to benchmark their event timing and promotional strategies against local competitors.
The Growth Loop
Automating newsletter parsing and streamlining admin workflows slashed manual curation time by over 90%.
Fresh, daily event content keeps diners coming back to the Umamii app to check what’s happening nearby. Higher engagement attracts more restaurant partners to take control of their presence, which in turn feeds richer data back into the discovery engine. By combining AI ingestion with ultra-fast human-in-the-loop tools, we turned raw marketing emails into a sustainable, high-velocity growth engine for the entire ecosystem.
We built the Umamii News Feed feature to turn static listings into a dynamic local event stream. Phase 1 combined AI newsletter extraction with high-speed admin tools (built-in image cropping, CTA link checking, and live mobile preview) and strict dev-to-prod environment isolation. Phase 2 opens self-serve partner posting and market intelligence.
