I like this! This was an idea I toyed around with in my head for a long time. I am glad to see you actually implement it.
One suggestion I have is this: it would be great if there was a way to "peek" ahead and see what other items will soon be coming into season within the next 1-2 weeks.
Oh ya connecting the Yummly API[0] to this would be really cool! Simply pass the search terms that are in season and you have seasonally curated recipes.
No, not quite accurate -- the only results it returned are apples and cherries. Apples are 100% correct. Cherries are not. And there are a plethora of squashes and pumpkins recently harvested, as we just had our first frost last week, so the list is clearly incomplete.
The database is definitely incomplete - I have a ton of work left to do.
There is also the problem that just because a certain produce item is being harvested within x miles doesn't necessarily mean that produce is available at local stores, and vice-versa.
My hope is that if I can get some early adopters, I'll be able to concentrate improving the data in a smaller number of targeted areas. This is the first time I've shown the site to anyone, so I'm hoping I can get some feedback to make the most effective improvements first.
Ah, see, I wasn't thinking this was about local stores. Because frankly, stores ship food in from wherever it is in season, so I don't need this info... I just look in the store and see what looks good. The better use case, for me at least, is to know when it is worth going to my local farms/markets and not even bothering with the store.
Apples are sort of correct, at least near me...but really only the late varieties. It lists apples as "In peak season", but peak apple season is late September, and the only ones really being harvested now are the Braeburns and Fujis and others that don't mind the frost so much:
Ah, that might explain it - I actually have varietal information in the database, but I'm not using it yet because it adds a ton of complexity and I really wanted to show this to people before spending more time on it.
So "peak season" might better be interpreted as "as least one variety is in peak season", at least for now. And "peak season" is a bit nebulous due to how hard it is to normalise between different data sources, but it's something akin to "most active harvest period"
I thought most apples one can get in any grocery store in the USA is typically retrieved from storage that has lasted 9-12 months. How does one guarantee an apple that is fresh from the tree other than picking it yourself?
But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana.
I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what is considered "local".
At the very least, in the results paragraph, change the display from "12 for your zipcode" which is just flatly false to "1 for your zipcode and 11 in the broader region" or something of that nature.
Thanks for the feedback - this is very first version, and there are a lot of improvements to make.
I think you're right about the wording, reading it with fresh eyes it is very confusing, and I'll change it ASAP.
Right now, all the farm information data is pulled from aggregated USDA data so there is a ton of work left to do to get better, finer-grained results. My plan is to look at which zip codes get the most queries and the most user sign ups, and improve results for those first.
The data wrangling aspect of this is definitely one of the biggest challenges. I've spent more time than I'd care to say extracting data from PDFs and other non-parser-friendly materials with regular expressions, and, often, manually.
Have you come across [Local Harvest](https://www.localharvest.org) before? That might be a good data source, at least for what farms exist where. I don't know if they collect data on what farms actually grow.
But I empathize a lot. I've pursued a number of side projects in this space. I've worked on an online farmer's market, a plant database, and a recipe database in the hope of solving a nexus of problems around eating sustainably and sourcing food locally. The only one that ever actually made it to live was http://www.fridgetofood.com and I haven't touched that in years, so it has decayed pretty hard.
I always got hung up on the data collection and translation aspect of things. It's not an easy problem to solve.
I haven't, but a few people have mentioned LocalHarvest, so I am definitely going to look into it.
Thank you for sharing your experience, it's really interesting to hear from other people interested in this space and I haven't had a chance to do so before, so I appreciate it.
Interesting project, not clear on the model for commercialization if any. Here in China we are looking at seasonality as a potential differentiator for our own food offering - http://infinite-food.com/
I think there are a few challenges with offering this as a commercial service. Firstly, the data. You stated you have a USDA data feed, that's great but is going to come away limited by its sources and I'd hazard a guess is largely going to be picking up sources that are the larger and more established versus smaller, more organic/seasonal farmers.
Second, the idea of locality. Right now I am typing this in Hong Kong and I can tell you basically nothing is produced here. So the locality model is 100% out of the question for many high density urban centers (which increasingly are where most people in the world live, usually in Asia).
Another issue from a conceptual standpoint is the high distance a lot of food travels in the US. Because of this reason the locality model is going to break down and the majority of the more established, larger-scale retail operators are sourcing in bulk from reliable supplies at distance rather than nearby vendors. What good is telling someone there are great local vegetables if they can't find them to buy them? Also, a half-price shipment may just have arrived from Honduras or Mexico.
Finally there is the reality of hydroponics. A great deal of some crops (eg. tomatoes, leafy greens, all baby greens) are produced in artificial growth conditions which are generally not seasonal or have exceptionally extended seasons.
If I were you I would think about the matches between data sources, potential demand and commercialization and see if you can't get in to the distribution ecosystem somehow (eg. 'supply chain transparecy') in more innovative places like Detroit where (according to media) a lot of this sort of thing is breaking down right now and there are probably good options for partnerships and cheap scaling.
Lots of people are trying to apply blockchain to agtech but the value add seems weak to me. If you went at the same space with a centralized model and a significant, customer-driven value add (short term/last minute deals for restaurants as per the recently fast growing and relatively new segment of hotels/travel, etc.) I do think this could have legs. But it seems there's a long way to go in finding and validating a model.
One way to look at it would be to have price and/or consumption data as your value add, another would be deal making, another would be qualitative assessment and supply chain transparency (some form of auditing/tracking). Another perspective to look at it from would be the players: restaurateurs, caterers, individual consumers, supermarket chains, farmers markets, etc. Many startups (eg. last mile food delivery) have done well partnering with restaurateurs who ware always under pressure and looking for an edge and immediate cashflow. There's surely opportunities in there, find them!
I think part of the problem you're finding is just that nothing is in season in your zip code, maybe? I don't really know Southern Indiana but I wasn't surprised that there were no real local results around me here in SW PA.
Up here in northern New England, I just harvested kale from my garden, and my CSA pickup on Sunday had a nice variety of squash, root crops, greenhouse spinach and cabbage. I'm sure there's plenty of things in season in southern PA.
I had a similar experience in Yakima county - According to this site the nearest local apples are in Chelan county which is funny because there are many many apple orchards here.
> Chile Peppers
> Chaves County, New Mexico (607 miles)
> In peak season
I guess there's a reason we call this hunting season... deer, turkey,pheasent, quail, dove plus many non-game animals (hogs, etc) are in season in the midwest.
Hilariously, hunting is free-range, grass-fed, antibiotic-free, cage-free, ethically-sourced, ethically harvested, local, and sustainable, among many other things like 100% of the fees go towards habitat preservation.
How can I use this to help me eat locally? I put in my zip code for Raleigh, NC (27601), and it gives me a result of: Cabbage in Pasquotank County, but there is no contact information. How can I get some of that cabbage?
Easiest thing for you is probably The State Farmer's Market [0], corner of Lake Wheeler Road and Centennial Parkway.
We keep a copy of the NC seasonal produce chart [1] hanging in the kitchen, and sometimes remember to check it.
Seems like one option for the OP would be to let users (moderators) update the site with vendors. That's a can of worms, but it could provide local information not available from online sources.
Very neat idea. I'd like to make the following suggestions:
1) Some vendors of said produce. If I can get grapes that were grown 5 miles away, awesome! Now where can I buy them?
2) A filter that lets me determine the maximum distance allowed. I ran a search based on a Northern Virginia zipcode and it recommended me some Bell Peppers from Georgia...609 miles away. We're not exactly "local" at this point. Simply having a filter option to stop it from showing me anything farther than 50 miles away would be useful.
I'm curious where the data comes from. For my zipcode (souther New Hampshire) it said apples are in peak season. Peak Apple around here ends early to late October (depending on weather).
Almost all the data right now is pulled from various USDA publications which I scraped, combined, sanity-checked and cleaned up. It's not perfect, but it's the best I could do as a first-run.
I'll have a look at southern New Hampshire specifically and see if anything weird is going on.
Awesome idea. My zip (59718, MT) shows 250 miles away as the nearest food. Definitely as others have pointed out, needs a lot more data to be viable. If you are to take this more seriously, maybe target a single community and connect with local farms, i.e. https://www.strikefarms.com/
You just typed out my comment for me. I tried 59715. I like to cook entirely local meals for fun and Montana has plenty of readily available farm goods for that.
I would say that the data I have at the moment are reliable in the sense that they are collated from informed, reasonably up to date sources (mainly US government sources at the moment). I would say that they are not very complete and not very granular yet, but this is something I am working on.
Just a small detail: The large subscription form popping up after a search made me think there are no results initially. Maybe make sure the results are higher up, and e.g. move the subscription form to the side?
Also, a softer (lighter?) background might bring out the fruit/vegetable images a bit better.
Love it. Might want to update the meta tags to remove the mention of the "preact-boilerplate." That's some prime real estate for describing your site when sharing it socially.
I get that you don't want to show mostly empty pages(but that's going to happen most places in November), but 500+ miles seems to be stretching the definition of near. Being in Tennessee, I don't know that I'd consider various citrus fruits 572 miles in Florida to be very helpful.
Very cool. Not sure if your motivation is to "promote local eating" or if you're trying to build a cool product that would bring in some cash... but if you're looking to monetize, I'd pay a small amount (about the cost of a magazine) for a HIGH-QUALITY set of recipe suggestions that use 6 ingredients or less, and take ~1hr to cook. (because I cook for a family every day, I don't have all day to cook, and I don't want to buy 100 ingredients I'll only use once)
The last point is important to me. Food porn is common these days, they put out these recipes with beautiful pictures, but the recipe is so impractical I'll probably never make it. Frankly, if I never make the recipe... it's of little added value to me.
Exactly. It doesn’t make sense to build a recipes app when many already exist. All they need to do is link to allrecipes search by included ingredient, and preferably sorted by average rating. Feature added with much less effort.
It's a mailing list, not a unix app. I'm not going to be piping the output from this into something else. To me the core "value prop" of this is "inspiration" for things to make. Adding specifics to that seems like a natural extension.
I wouldn't say it's inspiration that's lacking. It has more to do with the fact that vegetables are more expensive and harder to get than junk food, and the contents of said junk food, combined with factors like time and cultural trends, and of course education.
But clearly what you mean when you say that is you really want a long-form article filled with OPs life story about how they discovered vegetables, best ways to prepare vegetables, pointers for the recipe, etc. interspersed with ads before finally delivering the recipe somewhere towards the bottom of the page (possible behind a link to a second page with the actual recipe). /s
Oh gosh those are the worst. And they never look good on your phone, so you have to get your laptop out (or tablet if you have one).
If it's not a pointless blog/article header, then the ingredients and method are split up across "tabs". So that now, when it says "melt the butter and whisk in half the flour", you need to flick back and forward multiple times for each step to remember what to do and how much to add.
My kingdom for a browser plugin that automatically identifies a recipe site and strips out everything except the actual recipe. Reader mode comes close, but you still have to scroll through all the crap (assuming the recipe is all on one page).
What gets me though is why Google suddenly felt the need to rank these sites over more established recipe sites that literally just gave you the recipe. I've been in digital marketing a long time and seen a few "waves" of major SEO updates come and go. When there seems to be a significant shift in quality for a category of results, Google does tend to eventually take action. So I wonder if we're going to see a correction at some point that stops favoring those sorts of aggregator blog posts and "long-form recipes."
The content being created is not valuable, and is clearly being done solely for rankings at this point.
If any Googlers are reading this, I'd love any additional insight as to why these sites continue to do well.
they're often heavily promoted/shared - social signals seem to weigh heavily these days for SEO.
I have a clean site in a related space (https://keto.fm) and multiple subscribers have commented along the lines of: "this looked like a spam site, but once we browsed through it, it had rrally good content!"
I've also wanted such an extension so after reading this comment I was finally spurred into action.
It works on a few sites I know are popular plus any that use the standard div with "itemtype" set to "http[s]://schema.org/Recipe", which seems to handle about 85% of the long-winded blogs out there. It extracts the recipe div and displays it nicely at the top of the page, dimming the site behind it. It has a button at the bottom of the recipe to dismiss the popup. Most sites include a handy print link or button at the top as well so you can quickly click through to that formatting as well (i.e. if you actually print recipes or use the Paprika recipe manager bookmarklet).
Wow, nice work! Please circle back here and let me know once it is officially in the store, would love to check it out and spread the word!
Honestly, this is the sort of thing that once Amazon adds a Whole Foods API for ordering, you could add an unobtrusive "order these ingredients for pickup at Whole Foods" link or something at the bottom and hopefully make some commission off of it.
Ping me when it's built and I'll help you promote it if you're interested (I'm a marketer).
I use cooksmarts as a recipe service. Weekly menus have reusable items. Sometimes you make double of one item one day use in the next days dinner if it stores well. Also to seasonal cooking into account.
120 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadOne suggestion I have is this: it would be great if there was a way to "peek" ahead and see what other items will soon be coming into season within the next 1-2 weeks.
Not only was collecting the data time intensive, but determining the feature ingredient(s) was a challenge.
[0]: https://developer.yummly.com
There is also the problem that just because a certain produce item is being harvested within x miles doesn't necessarily mean that produce is available at local stores, and vice-versa.
My hope is that if I can get some early adopters, I'll be able to concentrate improving the data in a smaller number of targeted areas. This is the first time I've shown the site to anyone, so I'm hoping I can get some feedback to make the most effective improvements first.
http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/predicted_2017_apple_harvest_da...
So "peak season" might better be interpreted as "as least one variety is in peak season", at least for now. And "peak season" is a bit nebulous due to how hard it is to normalise between different data sources, but it's something akin to "most active harvest period"
But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana.
I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what is considered "local".
At the very least, in the results paragraph, change the display from "12 for your zipcode" which is just flatly false to "1 for your zipcode and 11 in the broader region" or something of that nature.
I think you're right about the wording, reading it with fresh eyes it is very confusing, and I'll change it ASAP.
Right now, all the farm information data is pulled from aggregated USDA data so there is a ton of work left to do to get better, finer-grained results. My plan is to look at which zip codes get the most queries and the most user sign ups, and improve results for those first.
The data wrangling aspect of this is definitely one of the biggest challenges. I've spent more time than I'd care to say extracting data from PDFs and other non-parser-friendly materials with regular expressions, and, often, manually.
But I empathize a lot. I've pursued a number of side projects in this space. I've worked on an online farmer's market, a plant database, and a recipe database in the hope of solving a nexus of problems around eating sustainably and sourcing food locally. The only one that ever actually made it to live was http://www.fridgetofood.com and I haven't touched that in years, so it has decayed pretty hard.
I always got hung up on the data collection and translation aspect of things. It's not an easy problem to solve.
Thank you for sharing your experience, it's really interesting to hear from other people interested in this space and I haven't had a chance to do so before, so I appreciate it.
I think there are a few challenges with offering this as a commercial service. Firstly, the data. You stated you have a USDA data feed, that's great but is going to come away limited by its sources and I'd hazard a guess is largely going to be picking up sources that are the larger and more established versus smaller, more organic/seasonal farmers.
Second, the idea of locality. Right now I am typing this in Hong Kong and I can tell you basically nothing is produced here. So the locality model is 100% out of the question for many high density urban centers (which increasingly are where most people in the world live, usually in Asia).
Another issue from a conceptual standpoint is the high distance a lot of food travels in the US. Because of this reason the locality model is going to break down and the majority of the more established, larger-scale retail operators are sourcing in bulk from reliable supplies at distance rather than nearby vendors. What good is telling someone there are great local vegetables if they can't find them to buy them? Also, a half-price shipment may just have arrived from Honduras or Mexico.
Finally there is the reality of hydroponics. A great deal of some crops (eg. tomatoes, leafy greens, all baby greens) are produced in artificial growth conditions which are generally not seasonal or have exceptionally extended seasons.
If I were you I would think about the matches between data sources, potential demand and commercialization and see if you can't get in to the distribution ecosystem somehow (eg. 'supply chain transparecy') in more innovative places like Detroit where (according to media) a lot of this sort of thing is breaking down right now and there are probably good options for partnerships and cheap scaling.
Lots of people are trying to apply blockchain to agtech but the value add seems weak to me. If you went at the same space with a centralized model and a significant, customer-driven value add (short term/last minute deals for restaurants as per the recently fast growing and relatively new segment of hotels/travel, etc.) I do think this could have legs. But it seems there's a long way to go in finding and validating a model.
One way to look at it would be to have price and/or consumption data as your value add, another would be deal making, another would be qualitative assessment and supply chain transparency (some form of auditing/tracking). Another perspective to look at it from would be the players: restaurateurs, caterers, individual consumers, supermarket chains, farmers markets, etc. Many startups (eg. last mile food delivery) have done well partnering with restaurateurs who ware always under pressure and looking for an edge and immediate cashflow. There's surely opportunities in there, find them!
Just my 2c.
> We found 9 results near your zip code...
> 3 Results from Michigan: (my county, my county, neighboring county...sure!)
> 6 Results from other states: Wisconsin, New York, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New Jersey.
That's 3 results with 6 that are hundreds of miles away.
But yeah, I like it, but "NEEDS MORE INPUT"! :)
I guess there's a reason we call this hunting season... deer, turkey,pheasent, quail, dove plus many non-game animals (hogs, etc) are in season in the midwest.
Some very angsty vegetarians on HN :D
We keep a copy of the NC seasonal produce chart [1] hanging in the kitchen, and sometimes remember to check it.
Seems like one option for the OP would be to let users (moderators) update the site with vendors. That's a can of worms, but it could provide local information not available from online sources.
[0] http://www.ncagr.gov/markets/facilities/markets/raleigh/ [1] http://www.ncagr.gov/markets/chart.htm
1) Some vendors of said produce. If I can get grapes that were grown 5 miles away, awesome! Now where can I buy them?
2) A filter that lets me determine the maximum distance allowed. I ran a search based on a Northern Virginia zipcode and it recommended me some Bell Peppers from Georgia...609 miles away. We're not exactly "local" at this point. Simply having a filter option to stop it from showing me anything farther than 50 miles away would be useful.
I'm curious where the data comes from. For my zipcode (souther New Hampshire) it said apples are in peak season. Peak Apple around here ends early to late October (depending on weather).
I'll have a look at southern New Hampshire specifically and see if anything weird is going on.
I visited the local farmer's market yesterday. Every 3rd stall had persimmons... Didn't see any in my Santa Clara County list.
Harvest: https://itunes.apple.com/app/harvest-select-best-produce/id3...
Seasons: http://www.seasonsapp.com/
Locavore: http://www.getlocavore.com/
Uh oh…
Also, a softer (lighter?) background might bring out the fruit/vegetable images a bit better.
I could see building a business on top of this FOR SURE.
Awesome MVP
Also lucky to be in a west coast state with lots of rain and lots of agriculture.
The last point is important to me. Food porn is common these days, they put out these recipes with beautiful pictures, but the recipe is so impractical I'll probably never make it. Frankly, if I never make the recipe... it's of little added value to me.
So yes, every bit helps.
or the food amounts to cookies dipped in honey dipped in butter dipped in icing sugar.
If it's not a pointless blog/article header, then the ingredients and method are split up across "tabs". So that now, when it says "melt the butter and whisk in half the flour", you need to flick back and forward multiple times for each step to remember what to do and how much to add.
What gets me though is why Google suddenly felt the need to rank these sites over more established recipe sites that literally just gave you the recipe. I've been in digital marketing a long time and seen a few "waves" of major SEO updates come and go. When there seems to be a significant shift in quality for a category of results, Google does tend to eventually take action. So I wonder if we're going to see a correction at some point that stops favoring those sorts of aggregator blog posts and "long-form recipes."
The content being created is not valuable, and is clearly being done solely for rankings at this point.
If any Googlers are reading this, I'd love any additional insight as to why these sites continue to do well.
I have a clean site in a related space (https://keto.fm) and multiple subscribers have commented along the lines of: "this looked like a spam site, but once we browsed through it, it had rrally good content!"
It works on a few sites I know are popular plus any that use the standard div with "itemtype" set to "http[s]://schema.org/Recipe", which seems to handle about 85% of the long-winded blogs out there. It extracts the recipe div and displays it nicely at the top of the page, dimming the site behind it. It has a button at the bottom of the recipe to dismiss the popup. Most sites include a handy print link or button at the top as well so you can quickly click through to that formatting as well (i.e. if you actually print recipes or use the Paprika recipe manager bookmarklet).
You can install the CRX directly: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter/m...
I will work on it some more to have proper controls, icon, work on more sites, etc then get it into the Chrome Web Store for easy installation.
Thanks for the final push!
Honestly, this is the sort of thing that once Amazon adds a Whole Foods API for ordering, you could add an unobtrusive "order these ingredients for pickup at Whole Foods" link or something at the bottom and hopefully make some commission off of it.
Ping me when it's built and I'll help you promote it if you're interested (I'm a marketer).
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux...