Swanyay

I was a chef for 12 years, working at some of the best restaurants in the country. From per se in NY to the French Laundry in Napa. I left kitchens behind a few years ago, became a dev, and a dad. I've found that the most relentless, crushing thing about being an adult is planning three meals a day for three people, day after day after day after day after day...

It's absolutely soul crushing, and I hate it. And I know how to and LOVE to cook, so y'all must be absolutely dying. The mental load is unbearable, on top of everything else that life piles on. I've been eating out more and more lately because planning just breaks me. I open the fridge, stare at it for 30 seconds, if it's not immediately clear what I'm gonna eat, I'm ordering something.

So I figured I would take a shot at it. I wanted it to basically house all the recipes that we like to cook, and know what I had on hand. That way it could basically take the planning off my hands and just pick what I already know I like. From there it would add all the stuff I needed to a grocery list, aggregate like items and from there all I would have to do is shop and execute.

While building, I was talking to my mom about it - who's a private chef. She just moved and has been building up her business in a new place, and was struggling to keep all her new clients in her head. She was going between texts, her calendar, her recipe binder, and managing boxes of inventory for each family in her home kitchen. It got to the point that she basically offloaded recipe research onto the families, so they would just pick what they want, she shops and cooks and then delivers.

I figured I could fold a few tools that she might need into the process and it actually fit pretty nicely. I built a professional layer where she can manage all her families in one place, with individual plans, grocery lists, recipe collections, preferences and inventory. It also has a couple nice touches like consolidated grocery lists for when she does a big shop.

Anyway! It's called Swanyay, the phonetic spelling of the French term soigné, which is something that we always used to say in kitchens when something simply was soigne, smooth, elegant, sleek, perfectly done. Even though I built it for myself, I just couldn't help but keep iterating and polish it up and see if it could help anyone else too.

Zero users besides us right now. Instacart integration is in the works. I'd love for anyone dealing with the same meal planning exhaustion to try it and tell me what's broken or what assumptions I made about how I like to organize myself and cook are totally off base.

swanyay.com