I built an app to help me cook with the food I already have. Today I'm sharing it with everyone!
by P-OEarlier this year, I grew tired of wasting food by letting it rot in the fridge and freezer and decided to fix this problem for me. I didn't want to change my habits or limit what to
cook but rather have a way for me to keep track of what's about to expire.
I like to cook and I buy groceries a few times a week. Sometimes, I buy things with a clear plan in my head as to what I'll do with them. But life gets in the way sometimes, and my plans change.
When plans change, I would forget about the things I wanted to do and the food just sit there in my fridge, until I find it again weeks later, rotten, wasted.
I don't have a huge fridge, the food is right in my face, but when I open the fridge and see 20 different things, it makes it really hard for me to figure out what to do with them.
Back in April, I decided to figure out a way for me to keep tracks of the thing I know are likely to be forgotten in my fridge. I built a spreadsheet that included 2 things:
- The food I wanted to make sure I cook;
- The expiration date for it (approximately).
That spreadsheet really quickly became an important tool for me. At a quick glance I now know what I should cook. And what's even more awesome is that as a result, I buy less stuff. Weird how things work!
At the same time I was working on this, ChatGPT & AI became really powerful and accessible. I took a stab at it and I was amazed at how great it was at finding recipes for foods I had already.
This story brings me to today. I created a website called LostFood: https://lostfood.io
LostFood is everything I listed above, and eventually more. If you read this far, I guess I should spend a few lines to explain what it does.
First, you'll create an account. Then, you'll be asked to name the place where you store your foods in your home. It can be a fridge, a freezer, a pantry, etc. You can create as many as you want.
Once that's done, you'll be brought to the homepage where you can start adding the food you have. You don't want to list everything you have, but rather all the things you know you'll either want to cook soon, or that will expire soon. Expiration date is just a date you're comfortable with, it doesn't have to be rocket science.
At that point, you'll be good to go.
Hit the Recipe page, and start asking for recipes. If you do try it, let me know how it went!
-
1
Love that you're attempting to tackle an issue related to food waste! For your site it maybe good to add facts like how much food is wasted per year (think I saw it's like 40%, shockingly high). You could also spin this such that if you make this into a product you pay a monthly fee for, the fee "pays for itself" because you are not wasting food you would've thrown out.
From the initial look of it, it's not a tool I would use because it seems burdensome to maintain the list of items in the product. It would be nice if you could use image recognition to quickly pull dates via your phone. I may be the wrong customer though because I optimize for convenience when doing things in the kitchen.
I see that you have reminders (which is great!), are you doing just email reminders or have you looked into less noisy channels (SMS, Messaging apps).
-
1
Thank you for the feedback! I also heard a similar number, it's really crazy!
Yeah I've been thinking about a monthly fee, but first I just want to see if folks want to use it as much as I am.
For the burden of maintaining that list, I have a similar sentiment as you. I thought it was going to be burdensome for me too, but it turns out that I just add the food I know is likely to go to waste. That makes the list a lot smaller for me.
As for image recognition, etc. Yes, I've had thoughts about that. Grocery store where I live send the receipt by email, so I already started playing with that avenue, but in the end, it hasn't been big enough of a burden for me yet.
I'm just getting started with reminders, I got a few plans that I'd like to consider, but I think there's core feature that I would like to see that are still missing.
For instance, the recipe generation tool requires the user to be "know" what they want to eat. I'd like to reverse the process where you start with no idea and the AI gives you a list of recipe name and you funnel your way through a recipe you'd like to cook in a few clicks.
-
