Launch HN: Kitchenful (YC S21) – Weekly recipes with integrated shopping
My girlfriend and I asked ourselves the question “What should we have for dinner?” nearly every day. It was annoying for both of us, and on top of that, after a long discussion about what to cook, I was the one who would go out and get the groceries. We never managed to meal plan a couple of days in advance, so the situation repeated itself every 1-2 days, and the result was often to either eat the same meals over and over again, or do impulsive shopping that would include unhealthy snacks or expensive takeout orders.
Our first breakthrough was to sketch meal plans on the weekend and order via REWE (largest German grocer) for home delivery. This changed our whole mood and feeling throughout the week. We had recipes ready to go and the question was answered immediately each day what we could do. We found ourselves eating better and feeling better in the process. However, meal planning and placing the related order still took me hours. With a technical background, I was interested in automating the process as much as possible so we could stick with it.
I worked at HelloFresh (a popular meal kit service) for over 4 years, but as a customer I found the offering wasn’t flexible enough to support our specific dietary needs and it didn’t relieve us of shopping for breakfast, snacks, beverages etc. at the grocery store. Since I’ve spent my professional life so far in the startup space, it came naturally to start a company to tackle this problem.
Our users receive a curated menu of recipes according to their dietary preferences and requirements each week. These recommendations are made based on information from the user (diet, ingredient preferences, nutrition goals, location, grocery options, etc.). Users can easily choose recipes and add additional products from their grocer’s inventory to the cart (you can also deselect ingredients which you already have at home). Our team takes care of organizing a grocery delivery from your favorite grocer. In the process, we optimize for reduced food waste/leftovers and the best price/quality ratio by choosing the most suitable products for the required ingredients.
Making good dinner recommendations is a surprisingly complex problem. Factors include the user’s mood and energy, not wanting to overwhelm them, and also understanding that even if they aim to live healthier, comfort food is sometimes needed. We therefore include real humans in verifying and quality-checking the suggestions that are made. Additionally, learning fast about the individual user is tricky: what do they like, how experienced are they with cooking, etc. so that we can recommend recipes which are similar to their favorites but not the same. Similarity to the user's tried-and-tested recipes is important to capitalize on existing cooking skills and taste preferences.
We’ve partnered with grocers such as Walmart, Kroger, and Target to be able to handle order placement and to know which products are currently available via their partner APIs. To map ingredients from recipes to suitable products we’ve created mapping tables which we use to generate shopping carts. As inventories don’t change that often, we match products to ingredients via scripts, but are able to review those mappings manually. We are fans of the Spoonacular API which helps us to parse structured recipe data. We are in the process of building a recommendation engine to create weekly menus for each of our users. Right now, those suggestions are created by rules using tags on the recipe data, and then reviewed and edited by our culinary experts. We launched our service in Berlin/Germany over the summer as part of the YC S21 batch, and were fortunate ...
58 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadServices like BlueApron, etc have way too much plastic waste, giving people a similar experience while letting them do the shopping (or not, I like the instacart integration) is a great idea.
Good luck!
It is not clear from the website. I expected to see a list of countries somewhere, maybe even after clicking a Try Free button. But it seems to be happy to accept a credit card from any country.
I had the "What do I make for dinner?" conundrum too, and wound up making my own web app to address that. The main thing for me was that I couldn't think of any recipes, other than ones I'd already made very recently.
So mine is kind of a diary, in that I record whatever we make today, and then I can see what we've made over the last couple of years, and get inspiration that way. It also has a "Future" list, where I can add things I want to make in the future.
We like the idea of a “Future” list and are already thinking about a bookmarking / recipe import feature. How do you save future ideas in your app? (urls?)
I understand the cold-start thing about the "diary" feature, but I think it'd be nice to have a list you could look back on of everything you've made, with notes on how you liked it, what you'd change, etc. That's been a big win for me.
Any plans to jump on the < 30 min delivery services, e.g. Gorillas/Getir/Flink/Weezy etc to get me the produce for a meal now?
Greetings from BER
The majority of our current users seem to prefer one big grocery delivery per week. Because the benefit of having the planning and shopping done a few days in advance means that it prevents decision making on the other days.
Having said that, we believe that shorter times from planning to actual delivery are still key in the user experience. So same day delivery and pickup options by the grocers help to improve the overall experience.
Will be def signing up to this service at some point.
p.s. I reported a bug to the email listed on your home page.
A couple of notes: I signed up for the trial and answered the questionnaire. To me, it is not clear what happens next. I didn't receive any welcome/confirmation email.
Also, since I'm based in Germany, I would have expected a reference to German supermarkets (Rewe, Edeka, etc.) but the home page only shows American stores. For a moment, I thought this was a US-only service.
Good luck and looking forward to try out the service.
Would love to chat/exchange thoughts!
On top of the personalization, we also have a different order process in which we take care of finding the best substitutes in case something is out of stock, and then provide you with personalized cooking instructions after the order.
Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works for you.
I really, really want to know if the green bell pepper has three lobes or four, because they taste completely different. The person being paid minimum wage to shop for my bell pepper couldn't care less, but the wrong choice will ruin my meal. The convenience of someone else shopping for you, while helpful, is racked with such problems of selection, quality, availability, etc.
The problems created by people shopping for me, at least in my experience, significantly offset the convenience.
How to determine quality will become a very big deal in technology in our lifetimes. What's real? What's good? What's legit? I guess it already is. Look at the collasal cesspool that is Amazon. What do I buy? I don't know. I don't know what's good.
In 20 years, your bananas will text you that they're ripe and you should eat them, especially because your potassium is low. In fact, the bananas will order themselves. But today, with the quality problems so thick with muck and subterfuge, I can't even get the correct bell pepper delivered.
This quality problem is why Amazon bought Whole Foods and is about to go brick and mortar countrywide. You just can't solve quality problems with intermediaries at this stage of the game because those intermediaries have no incentive to care.
The male versus female bell pepper nonsense is just that, nonsense. My mother thinks it's all nonsense, but she's wrong.
Besides that we are considering to give the user an option to simply export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used for offline shopping. We got this a few times as a feature request from users who like to shop the ingredients themselves, but still like a service which provides them with personalized suggestions each week and generates a combined shopping list.
The fact that this isn't included already is a bit of a red flag for me. It's a meal planning service that won't even give me the list of ingredients if I want to buy them myself?
Besides that, it does look interesting. I may sign up for a free trial after showing it to my wife and seeing if she'd find good utility in it. We've done grocery delivery for about a year, but we're on the verge of stopping. So having an exportable list of ingredients is obviously a must before I get too attached to your service.
Does this work in the UK?
The free trial requires a credit card, I don't want to give you my credit card without an assurance that you have food I want to pay for, or that you'll be able to deliver to me.
Do you mind me asking: in terms of food, what would be most important to you before signup? Is it to see the quality of the recipes, or rather a test if we can make good recommendations based on your specific preferences and needs?
For recipes, Homechart can import recipes from the web and gives you an "I'm feeling lucky" button that randomizes recipes for a meal plan based on parameters like when it was last made or specific tags. For our users, this seems to work well and let's them curate their recipe collection.
Sounds like they also do nice additions such as using the influx of quick grocery services to order the missing bits from the traditional grocery delivery platforms.
(Just to be clear, although the OP is about a YC startup, for sure the same applies in anybody's launch thread.)
What we learned is that when it comes to dinners, many decision makers in the household struggle with making the decision every week about what to eat for the next few days. The randomized recipe button seems to go into that direction. However making relevant suggestions is what we learned so far to be a key in the experience (e.g. considering the current season, what was for dinner in the past week, what is similar to a favorite dish but with a new twist, etc.)
From our existing users we get the feedback that a personalized menu each week and a much more convenient way to order their groceries saves them time and mental energy. For many worth the price. Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works.
Guess what is my name? yup.
I pay for plantoeat but their grocer integration is pretty poor.
Edit: Also I should note that "free" trials that automatically start charging are becoming illegal in Europe for good reason. It's a dark pattern we've just gotten used to. You should avoid that model. One reason I've stayed with plantoeat is that they don't auto-renew. I consciously choose every year to renew my subscription.
We focus on two things which I believe set us apart: (1) creating personal suggestions each week based on your preferences, diets and goals, which are currently reviewed and curated by real chefs (2) taking care of placing the order for you with your favorite grocer. Meaning the order process for you is seamless. You simply choose the meals you would like to cook, and any other specific products (like beverages, snacks, etc.) and place your order with 1 click.
We’ve found that this combination solves a bunch of problems existing solutions still have from a user perspective.
Thanks for the point about the auto-renew. I can personally relate to this. We decided to go for the auto-renew on a monthly basis, meaning our users can cancel anytime with limited downside and without the need to commit to long time spans. But we’ll definitely take another look at the opt-in models, thanks for the hint!
But maybe with food delivery, it’s a problem that can be successfully tackled since you’ll get feedback on customers. That’s a sweet data pipeline.
And in addition, as you pointed out, with each order we learn from the integrated shopping about the user’s preferences which enables us to continuously improve the service over time.
And if that's true, the advantage will go to the company that is ready for it.
* I echo that free-trial-rollover-to-paid is off-putting
* I can't seem to find information about the people who are putting together your recipes. Who are they? Where are they from? Where have they cooked?
* I also can't seem to find UI information about your app. Particularly, how easy is it to regenerate meals? Is nutritional information shown?
* What guarantees are there that if I save a recipe, that it will continue to be saved? (i.e. for your 2nd party recipes, what if a C&D comes in or you lose the license?)
* What import/export features are there in the App? Can I load in my own recipes that will be included in your rotation? Can I export your recipes into 3rd party utilities or into a markdown format?
Any one of these is mild, but taken together it walked me away from signing up for the free trial. I'm actively looking for products in this space and I'm 100% willing to pay $10/mo to remove the dinner frustrations from my life.
The featuresets I'm looking for:
* Recipes by high-trust sites and chefs (NYT, seriouseats, etc.)
* Easy meal generation (echo all of your points above and in this thread!)
* Easy meal re-generation
* Individual recommendation controls (thumbsup/thumbsdown individual recipes)
* Avoiding vendor lock-in (easy recipe import/export in a sane data format)
* Cross-platform (mobile ios/android, mac, linux, web)
* (Bonus) open-source
One technical question, how are you handling meal collation? I'd love to see your high-level technical stack there. Any ML? Individual recipe linking? Very curious :)
Let me try to cover some of the points:
- We have a small team of passionate foodies producing their own recipes and reviewing/curating weekly recommendations for our users. The team has an international background (incl. US/EU/Asia), which helps to tap into various experiences when it comes to generating the weekly menus. They have worked at some of the most popular European recipe apps. Feel free to check out our Instagram account to explore some of the recipes they have produced so far (https://www.instagram.com/kitchenful/)
- We provide our users with a personal menu each week. In addition there is the option to choose from standard categories and your own favorite recipes. Currently it’s not possible to import your own recipes, but we have it in the backlog. So far this hasn’t been a blocker for our users to use our service on a weekly basis.
- As of now we don’t have a feature to export the recipes. Mostly because so far we didn’t get that request from our users. But I see the peace of mind value in it as a user and will look into this.
- We are building our frontend clients with Flutter. So we look forward to supporting many platforms (iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Linux, ...) soon, stay tuned.
- Currently we are working with custom ranking and rotation algos for the recipe collation. But ML definitely on the horizon as we increase the number of data points :)
Happy to ping you once we have implemented a bit more features on the multi-platform and recipe import/export side. Excited to get your early feedback then.
I'm a little envious of founders who think this way. You've taken a problem you faced and turned it into an opportunity, which is awesome. Faced with the same problem I am certain I'd simply have tried to learn to "be more organised", and likely have failed and carried on with the same problem for a long time. Even if I thought it was a problem lots of other people face I doubt I'd have actually executed on an idea of solving it; I don't see my "failures" as viable problems to turn into businesses.
There's a lesson here for me (and probably many others) that you don't always have to look for big problems or complex problems to find viable startup ideas. Sometimes it can be something simple that just bugs you. I wish you the best of luck.
The beauty of it is that everyone is likely to face or notice problems in their own life which offer the chance to be solved. And usually one is not the only one facing it :)
Hopefully this inspires someone to solve a problem which nags them and which they can get passionate about.
We are excited about the opportunity to work on this problem. And are grateful for the constructive feedback we are receiving from the HN community.