Made - Save it. Cook it.

All your favorite recipes, in one place. With "Made" you'll be able to import recipes from anywhere and organize them in cookbooks. Lacking of inspiration for the dinner ? Try our AI chef !

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Inspiration

As a remote worker who cooks a lot at home, I very often feel the lack of inspiration when it comes to cooking. Even if I see plenty of videos on social medias, I never cook them since I have to find them back and the list of ingredients / instructions are not easily accessible (often in caption or on a blog).

I always wanted to build an app that could help me to gather all those recipes in one place and make it easy to shop.

So the pitch of Eitan obviously resonated with my current situation so I was more than happy to build an app in this space !

What it does

There are 5 main features:

Import recipes

My app allows people to import recipes from any sources (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Website, cookbooks, notes) and organize them in cook books

Create recipes

You can snap a photo of ingredients and input some text to create an original recipe with AI - Perfect when you have some ingredients left and don't know what to do with them.

Organize recipes

You can create cookbooks and organize all your recipes.

Meal plan

You can add saved recipe to specific days of the week and specify the meal type (breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack)

Smart grocery shopping

You can easily shop your saved recipes by adding the recipes to the list: ingredients we'll be organized by category so you can make your shopping effective.

How I built it

Product research

I firstly benchmarked existing apps in the same space (cooking, recipe imports).

I identified the core features my app needed to have, having in mind that they should respect the brief.

App identity

I went on Eitan’s website / Social platforms to know more about him and his identity. I went for blue colors and took its typography of its name on his website to make the app logo.

From that, I defined a theme in my app that would match his.

MVP of the killer feature: Import recipes from socials

I firstly implemented the iOS “ShareExtension” that would allow users to import recipes from social medias. At this stage I did not focused on design at all.

Building the core feature

Once MVP done, I polished the main feature:

  • Display beautiful generated images of ingredients
  • Being able to select cookbooks after import etc.
  • Integrate the visual identity defined in step one.

Building the others features

Once the core feature done, I moved on to the others:

  • Meal planning
  • Grocery list
  • Recipe creation

Finalizing

At this stage I added Auth, Onboarding, Monetization.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge was the “Recipe import” feature because:

  • I had to develop a ShareExtension in iOS to have the main feature to work, I never did Swift code so I fully did it with the help of AI, which helped so much.
  • I had to find ways to get data of social media posts, so I needed reliable APIs that would gave me those informations. APIs needed to respond fast for good UX and have fair pricing.
  • Having a nice recipe detail view UX was also a challenge because displaying ingredients was kind of a must-have for a recipe app, so I had to :
    • Identify what are the most used ingredients in recipes (by importing a lot from social medias)
    • Generate all the ingredient images which include finding a nice style (3D polished in my case) and make sure AI respect this style on each ingredient image generation.
    • Make sure the AI would match the correct images with the ingredients of the imported recipe.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

Overall, I am very proud of the final result given the time frame we had.

But more specifically:

  • The "importing from socials" feature works really well and find it so convenient to use
  • The images of recipe imported from cookbooks are super accurate and are generate in 0.5 sec which is really cool.
  • I love the 3D ingredients, I think they look very nice and make the app stands out from the crowd
  • I am proud of the app identity, I think it truly resonated with Eitan’s one.
  • I am proud that the app support importing recipes from all social platforms and even audio recognition !
  • I think I successfully used AI to speed up my work and focused my energy on subject that matters.

What I learned

  • I learned that in 4 weeks you can ship a full-feature app !
  • I knew it but: good Software engineering principles remains unbeatable especially when it comes to ship fast
    • Thanks to “Dependency Injection”, I was able to easily add new social platforms or modify my backend use cases without breaking anything.
  • I learned that setting up monetization can be done in 1 hour !
    • RevenueCat remote paywall is a huge save of time. I was able to integrate RevenueCat so much faster than before, so it is cool to see the amazing job done here, thank you <3

What's next for Made - Save it. Cook it.

Here are the opportunities I identified:

  • Shipping the app on Android (Actually all features works on Android !)
  • Translating the app in all languages
  • Optimizing recipe import time (refactoring, caching)
  • Shareable grocery lists / cookbooks across accounts
    • Live grocery list -> When a grocery list is shared you can see in realtime items being checked when you do shopping with someone else.
  • Community feature where people could post their recipes and we could highlight Eitan's ones
  • Smart budgeting: we could compute the price of the recipes depending of the region of the user so people could easily predict the cost of their grocery shoppings.
  • Integrated shop feature where people could browse cuisine ustensiles and buy them
  • Automatic grocery shopping with AI: - You select recipes you want to shop - You pick up your favorite grocery drive service near your location - AI does the online shopping for you - You validate the order

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