Food List

I took a lot of what I learned building Food List, added in some new knowledge of local-first PWAs and CRDT-based data sync, and created my new product, Gnocchi.club. I've been working on this new direction for about a year now, and it's surpassed Food List in every way! This is my third cooking app and it definitely feels like it took 3 iterations to understand the problems fully and find a good solution.

If you're my 1 follower here, you should check it out 🙂
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/gnocchi-club

Food List is live! For my initial product, I focused on the core goals:

1. ✔ It's a shopping list, it needs checkboxes. Items can be checked, unchecked, reordered. Checked items can be cleared. Everything gets saved and sticks around when you reload.

2. ↕ The big one - ingredients merge! When I add two ingredients of the same food, they combine to save you time and confusion at the store. The functionality is a bit naive at the moment, but the concept is proven.

3. ➕ Adding ingredients should be easy and intuitive. You can copy + paste whole lists right into the box, or you can install the app as a PWA and use your phone's native share dialog to send them over.

4. 🔃 Stretch goal achieved! Using P2P web technologies, you can scan a QR code from Food List on a laptop or PC and copy the list to your phone. Now you can compile a list on a big screen, send it to your phone and head to the store.

5. 🆓 The big thing (for me) about all this is it's entirely free for me to host indefinitely. My tech goal for this MVP was to not host any servers. It's amazing what you can do without servers these days.

If you're like me, a day rolls around each week where you think I don't have any food, and if it's before 6PM you also think, I should go get groceries.

But then begins the turmoil of attempting to compile a grocery list. Because too few items on the list makes the trip less worthwhile - but you also suddenly can't remember any recipes you like.

Once you have recipes, though, the real pain starts - creating a list of shopping items. Again, if you're like me, you open up a generic note-taking app and copy + paste ingredient lists off websites into a checklist. Maybe you take the time to sort items so identical foods are adjacent to one another so you don't scroll halfway down the list to realize you have to go back to produce to get more spinach.

After having this problem over and over again - I decided I had the skills and experience to take a stab at solving it. Knowing my MVP would be pretty simple to achieve, I decided to dive in.