Baton Rouge couple Ryan and Laney King hope their new smartphone tool—called the Crawfish App—will help solve the long-held dilemma for crawfish consumers in south Louisiana: Where is the best, cheapest crawfish in the Capital City?
The two launched their app, which is free for Apple and Android users, earlier this month.
Anyone can add crawfish vendors, and currently there are around 300 vendors on the app in Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Houma, New Orleans and Covington, and the surrounding areas. Every Thursday, the Kings call up each vendor and find out the prices for the weekend for both live and boiled crawfish and update the pricing on the app.
The idea is to simplify the mundane process faced by anyone looking for the best crawfish deal for the weekend. The app, which first asks the user’s location, shows every crawfish vendor nearby, ranked from cheapest to most expensive. The user can choose either boiled or live crawfish prices, and soon there will be a functioning review feature for users to rate the vendors.
“This is just the early stage,” Laney King says. “In the future we will have a portal that allows vendors to log in and update pricing themselves.”
Eventually the Kings will add more features and begin advertising to turn a profit. There has been interest as far west as the Houston area.
Vendors are jumping at the opportunity, King told Daily Report. The app started with 130 vendors when it launched and grew to more than 300, including every Rouses location in the state. Now more than 6,500 people have downloaded it to their smartphones.
According to the app, the cheapest live crawfish in the greater Baton Rouge area this weekend can be found at Rick’s Crawfish in Port Allen for $1.75. For boiled crawfish, Rouses Market, Winn Dixie and Berthelot’s are selling three pounds for $8.97.
—Sam Karlin
