A Marseille student turned a US "fast-food fat-loss ordering" app into a French version: 3 weeks later it's on the French Top Grossing chart, driven by four unnoticed TikTok side accounts

MenuGo launched on the French App Store in October 16, French-only, built by a 20-year-old student in Marseille. It does something the US already had: tells you what to order at McDonald's, Burger King and KFC during a fat-loss phase. By November 6 it had only 54 ratings, yet it kept sitting between #30 and #96 on the French "Food & Drink" Top Grossing chart. It's not a big business, but the playbook is clear, almost no one has noticed, and languages outside French are still open.

"They said a 7-day free trial, and I got charged €9.99 the moment I used it"

In October 30, a French user gave MenuGo 1 star with the title "Scam": "They said a 7-day free trial, but I was charged €9.99 as soon as I started using it…" Another line in the review: they found it through TikTok, and should have been more careful.

This review captures two things about the app: users come in from TikTok, and they're asked to pay right away. The store page does state the terms: the annual plan at €39.99 includes a 7-day trial, while the monthly plan at €9.99 has no trial, and without a subscription nothing works. This user most likely tapped the monthly plan. So to be precise, it isn't deceiving anyone; the paywall is simply hard, hard enough that someone took it for a scam.

What it is

You're eating out, don't want to ruin your fat-loss phase, so you open MenuGo, and within ten seconds it tells you what to order at this place.

• You enter your goal (fat loss, maintenance, muscle gain), weight, height and activity level, and it calculates how many calories, protein, carbs and fat this meal should be;
• 100 chains and 8000 dishes, each scored 0–100 against your goal, with the ranking changing as your goal changes;
• each dish comes with what to say at the counter: no sauce, single item, which drink to swap;
• a map of nearby fast-food restaurants, snap a photo of an independent shop's menu to estimate its nutrition, food and weight logging, Apple Health sync, and a lock-screen widget "What should I eat for lunch today?"

Data comes from each chain's official nutrition tables, with the scrape date noted. Oct 24's 1.1 update added over 800 dishes at once, plus "combos": it puts together the best combo for your goal at McDonald's (Best Of), Burger King (Menu XL), and so on. French homegrown chains like Quick and Pokawa are included too.

Developer Bastien Ballestra, a two-year college student in Marseille (computer science track), opened a solo studio this April to build software for small businesses. This App is the only one under his name.

The US already proved it

He didn't invent this category. The US app MenuFit launched in August 2025 with nearly identical features, collected over 54k ratings on the US store, claims 1.5M users on its site, and grew through fitness creator partnerships (fitness TikTokers with 530k followers posting with the #menufitpartner tag). Then English-market followers like LeanBites (4,172 ratings on the US store), Order Fit, and What2Order arrived, with a long tail below 100 ratings. The English market is already crowded.

But all of these are in English and cover US chains. MenuFit has only 29 ratings on the French store and still shows English; Order Fit has a French UI but US menus. A French user who wants McDonald's France's Best Of has to dig through each brand's website nutrition tables, or use Calotank, a French calorie web page that doesn't rank by goal or tell you what to order. MyFitnessPal and Yazio, calorie trackers, include fast-food entries, but can't answer "what should I order at this store."

The demand was already built in France. On French fitness TikTok, videos like "the best fast food while cutting" or "I rated fast-food restaurants for fat loss" get between 100k and 1M views each. People who want fast food and want to lose fat have always existed; no French-language app has picked them up.

MenuGo does exactly this: same features, but in French, with French chains and French fitness vocabulary (sèche for cutting, prise de masse for bulking).

Where the users come from: four barely-followed accounts posting on schedule every day

Since October, at least four new TikTok accounts have been promoting MenuGo: calories.fastfood, macros.fastfood, bastien.food, and menugo.app, all with bios reading "MenuGo sur l'App Store." The biggest has 28 followers. Over three weeks the four accounts posted roughly 210 videos, each getting 250 to 1,700 views. menugo.app posted at the same minute on consecutive days, which clearly looks automated.

The content runs on a few fixed templates. A few examples (TikTok, 10-26 to 11-06):

• "Burger King's cheeseburger or King Fish? MenuGo ruled: cheeseburger, 305 kcal vs 398, similar protein." (278 views)
• "I had MenuGo order for me at Burger King, mid-cut: Big King plus chicken nuggets, 657 kcal, 37g protein. Numbers from Burger King's official site." (308 views)
• "20-piece Kingbox nuggets, while cutting: 868 kcal, 48g protein. MenuGo says it's 'borderline for your cut.'" (259 views)
• There's also a joke hook: "He totalled his car... but he knew what to order at KFC while bulking."

Each video gets only a few hundred views; across the four accounts, the three-week total is roughly on the order of 100k views (estimate). The same videos are also posted to Instagram (@bastien.food, 0 followers) and YouTube Shorts (@menugo.officiel). The App Store link in the Instagram bio carries per-account tracking parameters, which suggests he's measuring conversion account by account. One video reads "I wrote MenuGo to...", using the persona of an indie developer appearing on camera.

No press coverage, nobody on X is talking about it, and neither Meta's nor TikTok's ad libraries show any ads for it. Whether it runs Apple Search Ads can't be seen from outside.

Money: the Top Grossing rank looks better than the actual revenue

(App Store France chart, 10-28 to 11-06; average rating 4.8)

It slides down the Top Free chart while bouncing between ranks 30 and 96 on Top Grossing: few downloads, but people pay every day. Don't be scared by "top 60 on Top Grossing." In Nov 6, the apps sitting next to it were small ones like recipe collections, wine ratings, and meal prep. The French category's Top Grossing bar is low; a few 9.99€ subscriptions a day is enough to chart. Real revenue isn't public; estimated from rank and rating growth, probably a few hundred to a few thousand euros a month (inference, low confidence).

Who it's competing with

It's currently the only French-language option on the French store. Its biggest risk isn't other indie developers; it's MenuFit adding French someday.

If it were you

Verdict: worth trying, but don't expect big money. This is a "proven small tool in the US, swap the language and the local menus" play. The playbook is fully public and cheap to run, and no one has done it in the major languages outside France yet. The weak spot: each language's market is small, and revenue hasn't been proven.

Who it suits: one or two people, working in their native language or a market they know well, such as Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Japan, or Korea, where fast-food chains are plentiful and fitness content is hot. You're willing to spend two or three weeks pulling each chain's official nutrition tables, and you can ship short videos consistently every day.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone aiming at the English market (already crowded, and you'd be competing with MenuFit's creator budget); anyone who doesn't want to do data cleanup (local menus are the whole moat); anyone who needs one app to pay their bills (in a single language, this category is likely a side-project scale).

How to do it: pick one country and import the official nutrition tables for its top 30 chains (in Germany, Döner chains and Nordsee; in Brazil, Habib's and Giraffas, and so on), labeling sources and dates clearly. The core is three things: goal-based scoring, combo building, and counter scripts. Use its pricing for subscriptions: annual comes with a 7-day trial, monthly doesn't. But state "charged immediately on monthly" on the paywall, or you'll get one-star reviews.

How to get users: copy its playbook and open 3 to 5 vertical niche accounts using the local fitness vocabulary. Post on a schedule every day with "A or B," "let the app order for me," and "how much protein in this combo," and report specific calorie and protein numbers in every post. Give each account's store link different tracking parameters, and after two weeks keep only the accounts that convert. Then partner with one or two local fitness creators. That's how MenuFit grew in the US.

Deadline: January is cutting season, when fitness content and willingness to pay both peak. Get listed and the accounts running by mid-December to catch the post-New Year wave.

Signs you're wrong: ① MenuGo still has under 150 ratings in December, or drops out of the top 100 on Top Grossing, which means the account-matrix approach can't carry volume and this category can't hold up on one language; ② MenuFit or LeanBites launches German, Spanish, or French versions with local menus, and the window closes; ③ your accounts have run for three full weeks and daily downloads are still in single digits.