Meal Planner Recipe app
Hello guys,
I'm a really new to this site, but I really wish to get advice and learn from all of you. I have been having a problem on knowing what to cook for my next meal. It is not very efficient to Google around and look for recipes. I have tried using apps to find recipes, but I found most of them hard to use or not so relevant. So I told myself, "Why can't I create a simple app for myself, a simple app where you can create your own recipe, like other users' recipes, and also create a weekly meal plan based on your liked/created recipes"? I have been working on it as side project, and now I am finding opportunities make it profitable.
Given the fact that there are already many meal planner apps out there, do you think anyone would even bother using it, let alone pay for it?
Do you guys have a similar problem/need? What features would you want in a meal planning app?
I would really appreciate any feedback.
I already have something up at https://gourmetic.nainarazz.now.sh. Please try it out. It's not that bad :-).
Hi,
there are quite a few recipe apps out there like yummly, mealime, BigOven, Paprika etc.
What I'm missing the most is the ability to create a sane grocery list which tells me where to buy what for my meal plan. I do not want to get crazy recipes for which I do not get the ingredients where I'm living. The reason for bad grocery lists is most likely: recipes are often not normalized, i.e. one recipe tells you it needs flour, the other tells it needs wheat flour, so now how to merge this? Is flour equivalent to what flower? Probably, for some recipes yes, for some not. So the grocery list contains often duplicate items that could not be merged automatically.
I would like to get recommendations based on taste, time of year, even best before date would be interesting to consider to avoid food waste. Like a real intelligent Spotify for meal planning. And with a click I can order everything at my supermarkets and just pick it up in one go. No need for a delivery service. I would definitely pay for such an app and I can imagine others would, too.
The thing is, many supermarkets do not publish their inventory as a public API. So you first have to solve that problem.
hi rynvelt, thanks for the detailed feedback. It's worth thinking about.
Hey nainarazz,
I hope this doesn't come across as negative - I don't mean it to be - but this is a very crowded market, and I think it's very difficult to succeed in it.
That's not to say it's not possible, but you're likely to find that people want plan meals in kinds of different ways, and given how readily available recipes are, it may be difficult to monetise it.
But as I said, it's not impossible...! If you're passionate about this, I'd suggest you find some people who have this pain point too, and are willing to give you a good amount of time (30 mins or so) for detailed feedback on what you have. Listen to what they say, try and understand their underlying pain points, and iterate on what you have.
Thanks for your feedback