Indians are discovering the thrill of ordering food without the food. FoodNeverComes allows users to pick from 22 cuisines, add dishes to a cart, check out and wait for a rider — but the food never arrives. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.

The site's slogan is: "The food never comes - but the dopamine does." It was built by two 26-year-old software developers — Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma — from Udaipur in India's northern state of Rajasthan. The site 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. A user selects dishes, watches the total climb and hits checkout. Then they get a dummy AI-generated call from inside the site: the rider says he is outside the building but cannot find the street or door. Except there was never any food in the first place. The order exists only on the screen.

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 and has since travelled well beyond, spawning a growing crop of sites — Dopamine Shop or Fakehaul, for example — that mimic everything from food delivery and shopping to travel.

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. Parmar's mother did much the same. "She would add things to the cart and say, 'I will order this later'," he recalls.

Parmar's own version ended at food delivery checkouts. During a two-month project in Mumbai, he says, he was spending 5,000-10,000 rupees a week on food, sometimes ordering treats he did not necessarily need: Belgian waffles, ice cream and, once, a large jar of sour cream he barely wanted and gave away to friends. He believes "perhaps the real craving was not always for the food, but for the ritual of ordering it".

What begins as genuine hunger, the two argue, can become associated with the pleasure of ordering. Over time, boredom, anxiety or habit can trigger the urge even when the 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. You start associating the act of ordering with that dopamine hit. Eventually, it's not just the food you want," says Parmar.

Ravi Dhar, director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights, calls this "anticipatory utility" - the pleasure of looking forward to consumption. It is especially strong with things that capture the imagination - a new pair of shoes, a holiday, a restaurant meal - because anticipation becomes part of the experience. Sometimes, Dhar says, anticipation can be more pleasurable than ownership: "The thrill is in the chase." Once the object is acquired and the tension resolved, psychological arousal falls.

Neuroscience has a name for this gap between the chase and the catch, and it complicates a popular idea. Dopamine is not simply the brain's pleasure chemical, whatever the internet's talk of "dopamine hits" might suggest.

Kent Berridge, a University of Michigan neuroscientist who developed the theory of "wanting" and "liking", says they are separate processes. Wanting is the motivational pull towards something; liking is the pleasure of having it. They often travel together, but not always. Dopamine, in his account, drives the first, not the second. Tempting food or products online are likely to activate this wanting system, which Berridge calls "incentive salience". "Some situations can trigger 'wanting' by itself," he says. We can pursue something intensely even when the eventual pleasure is weak - or, in more everyday terms, want something more than we ultimately like it.

Dr Anna Lembke, a Stanford University addiction psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, makes a similar distinction. "To call dopamine a chemical of pleasure is an oversimplification," she told me. "Dopamine is the molecule that says 'get more of' or 'do more of', but it doesn't necessarily equate to pleasure." What she adds is the role of ritual. Cues and habits attached to a reward can become reinforcing in their own right, she says: in addiction, the routines leading up to drug use can eventually matter as much as the drug itself. "Anticipation of reward can be as reinforcing as the reward itself," she says.

Can repeatedly ordering imaginary food satisfy a real craving? Berridge says the ritual could produce a "dopamine hit and strong 'wanting', and also evoke faint conditioned 'liking'".