You open FoodNeverComes, pick from 22 cuisines and start scrolling. Butter chicken looks good. You add a few dishes, watch the total climb and hit checkout.
A tracker says a rider is on the way. Then you get a dummy AI-generated call from inside the site. He is outside your building, he says, but cannot find your street or door.
Except there was never any food in the first place. The order exists only on the screen. Skip the bill," says the site., external Its slogan is blunter: "The food never comes - but the dopamine does." Built by two 26-year-old software developers - Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma - from Udaipur in India's northern state of Rajasthan, FoodNeverComes says it has attracted more than 2.7m visitors since its launch in June.
It now offers 22 kitchens, 327 dishes and 319 real recipes, complete with fake prices, a simulated checkout and a fictional delivery experience. FoodNeverComes belongs to a new internet genre: "dopamine sites", which recreate the rituals of consumption without the consumption. There are fake shopping sites, fake delivery services and even fake holidays.
The genre took off in South Korea, external and has since travelled well beyond, spawning a growing crop of sites - Dopamine Shop, external or Fakehaul, external, for example - that mimic everything from food delivery and shopping to travel. What, exactly, are we enjoying when we enjoy buying something? The idea began with the founders' own shopping habits.
Parmar and Sharma met on a computer science diploma course and later started NeuroX AI, which builds software and AI products and makes Instagram content. They noticed it in their own lives: online baskets filling up with things they wanted, but never actually bought. Sharma would browse electronics, fill an online basket and abandon it.
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