Cookyer - Validate my idea

The problem you describe is real (my wife and I experience it), but I'm not sure the solution is technology.

Our solution? Meal planning. Take a little time at the start or end of each week and think about what you'll need in the following days. Look at what you already have, build a shopping list of what you don't have. Awesome! You don't have to think about it the rest of the week, you just execute the plan. We often end up modifying the plan slightly. For example: swapping days around if we're too tired or busy to cook something more complicated, we'll cook a simpler meal from later in the week sooner.

Some people even cook all their meals ahead of time and put them in the fridge or freezer, but we don't do that. I like fresh food :P

If there was something that made meal planning a little easier - maybe it saves our favorite recipes, helps us pick some at random, and compiles the shopping list across all recipes, I might be interested in something like that.

Whatever direction you decide to go in, I wish you well! :)

Also second the idea of snapping a photo of your fridge and using machine learning to identify your ingredients and suggest recipes. Sounds lazy but entering ingredients is too much of a barrier. Even better...a fridge with a camera inside that sends you notifications at the end of your work day what to pick up on the way home.

Hey Miguel, Your idea sounds pretty similar to Supercook - I tried to use it a while a go but found that keeping what was in my fridge up to date took too much effort.
Now, I plan my meals ahead for the week similarly to @tylerchurch and would find something where I can save my favorite recipes, plan meals for the week, and compile a shopping list across mobile & desktop would be helpful.

I love the idea of filtering recipes to match with ingredients that I have available!

Hey ! We have a Chef app (https://kokito.app) and they run into a similar problem from time to time. What is gonna be on the menu depending on what I have available ?

The obvious solution is of course to always "plan first" and there are several meal planning apps out there.

I haven't heard of any good solution yet as to "What can I do with what I have left" but I've found many people are starting to approach this problem by solving the "food waste" issue.

I encourage you to google via that vertical. One app we are considering is Fridge.(https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fridge)

You might want to checkout https://myfridgefood.com/

I've had this idea before, although I did not puruse: to make this work you need to be able to identify and store the foods in an EASY WAY. Not type in and select, but rather snap a photo and instantly identify or through a QR code. If you can solve that I think this is a huge thing.

The problem is real, and I'm working on a similar problem with my app, AvoToast! I'm specifically focusing on weight loss right now, but I see helping people figure out what to cook as a huge problem space without any clear winners yet.

One of your biggest hurdles is onboarding: You need to go through and add ~15 (maybe more) ingredients before you're going to get non-obvious recipes. And until we have smart fridges, keeping track of what I have in the fridge week to week is a lot of hassle that I'm not sure I'd be willing to do. If you can integrate with Amazon Fresh/Instacart, etc, maybe this would appeal to me! As my personal alternative, I just keep easy to cook things in the fridge (hot dogs, chicken nuggets, pizza, frozen veggies, etc) for days I don't feel like really cooking.

My approach for AvoToast is to focus on building a meal plan at the start of the week, rather than what I have in the fridge. I/my hopeful users are going to go shopping each week anyway, so what's in my fridge doesn't matter as much (though I obviously want to use up what I have).

Hey Miguel, this sounds like a pretty cool concept, I think the biggest challenge as mentioned by others will be monitoring the stock you have available without a lot of manual processing. I guess a way round this would be a system in which the user has meals throughout the week off of a meal plan. Then just submits chosen meals leavinging an indication of what’s left. Not sure if this in itself als becomes complex though.

Best of luck!

The main issue is to maintain available products list... This is too much effort imho. But probably it could be some kind of "sos meal" application - it happens often that you you need to cook smth, realizing that there are only a few available products at home, so the one option is to go for a shopping (extra time and money) or you could provide a tool that gives you meal recipes containing only these few ingredients.

I think this is a good idea. I would think this might need to go with consumers who shop online. I don't really like the idea of manually adding my items in after shopping. If I shop online it could automatically pull that data or maybe even scan a receipt and it could pull all the items in. I like the idea and would like to see some more validation. Make a landing page and see how many emails you can gather and judge interest. I would also see this for sure needing to be a mobile application.

That's an amazing idea and very practical for people with hectic schedules who literally have no time to think over what to have for lunch or dinner. It would be great if you could add certain categories according to people's preferences and maybe different types of cuisines. All the best for your launch!