[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Kitchenful (YC S21) - Weekly recipes with...
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Launch HN: Kitchenful (YC S21) - Weekly recipes with integrated
shopping
Hi HN, I'm Christian and here together with my co-founder Christian
(no typo!), we are the founders of Kitchenful
(https://www.kitchenful.com). Kitchenful is an app for personalized
recommendations of recipes that also gets you the ingredients
delivered from a local grocery store. My girlfriend and I asked
ourselves the question "What should we have for dinner?" nearly
every day. It was annoying for both of us, and on top of that,
after a long discussion about what to cook, I was the one who would
go out and get the groceries. We never managed to meal plan a
couple of days in advance, so the situation repeated itself every
1-2 days, and the result was often to either eat the same meals
over and over again, or do impulsive shopping that would include
unhealthy snacks or expensive takeout orders. Our first
breakthrough was to sketch meal plans on the weekend and order via
REWE (largest German grocer) for home delivery. This changed our
whole mood and feeling throughout the week. We had recipes ready to
go and the question was answered immediately each day what we could
do. We found ourselves eating better and feeling better in the
process. However, meal planning and placing the related order still
took me hours. With a technical background, I was interested in
automating the process as much as possible so we could stick with
it. I worked at HelloFresh (a popular meal kit service) for over 4
years, but as a customer I found the offering wasn't flexible
enough to support our specific dietary needs and it didn't relieve
us of shopping for breakfast, snacks, beverages etc. at the grocery
store. Since I've spent my professional life so far in the startup
space, it came naturally to start a company to tackle this problem.
Our users receive a curated menu of recipes according to their
dietary preferences and requirements each week. These
recommendations are made based on information from the user (diet,
ingredient preferences, nutrition goals, location, grocery options,
etc.). Users can easily choose recipes and add additional products
from their grocer's inventory to the cart (you can also deselect
ingredients which you already have at home). Our team takes care of
organizing a grocery delivery from your favorite grocer. In the
process, we optimize for reduced food waste/leftovers and the best
price/quality ratio by choosing the most suitable products for the
required ingredients. Making good dinner recommendations is a
surprisingly complex problem. Factors include the user's mood and
energy, not wanting to overwhelm them, and also understanding that
even if they aim to live healthier, comfort food is sometimes
needed. We therefore include real humans in verifying and quality-
checking the suggestions that are made. Additionally, learning fast
about the individual user is tricky: what do they like, how
experienced are they with cooking, etc. so that we can recommend
recipes which are similar to their favorites but not the same.
Similarity to the user's tried-and-tested recipes is important to
capitalize on existing cooking skills and taste preferences. We've
partnered with grocers such as Walmart, Kroger, and Target to be
able to handle order placement and to know which products are
currently available via their partner APIs. To map ingredients from
recipes to suitable products we've created mapping tables which we
use to generate shopping carts. As inventories don't change that
often, we match products to ingredients via scripts, but are able
to review those mappings manually. We are fans of the Spoonacular
API which helps us to parse structured recipe data. We are in the
process of building a recommendation engine to create weekly menus
for each of our users. Right now, those suggestions are created by
rules using tags on the recipe data, and then reviewed and edited
by our culinary experts. We launched our service in Berlin/Germany
over the summer as part of the YC S21 batch, and were fortunate to
get a lot of early adopters using Kitchenful as their weekly
solution for meal planning and grocery shopping. We have now
started serving US customers. We've also set up a 14-Day free
trial period for everyone who's interested so you can try it out:
https://www.kitchenful.com. By helping people to eat better _and_
save time and energy on meal planning and grocery shopping, we
believe we can help them feel better and have more energy for
family, friends, work, and hobbies. We'd love to hear about your
own experiences with cooking at home throughout the week and
discovering new dishes. Any ideas/feedback/questions you might have
about what we're building are more than welcome! Thank you!
Author : cschiller
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-11-30 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Holy cow, $10/mo for what amounts to Allrecipes? Our product,
| Homechart, does a whole lot more besides just recipe management
| and can be self hosted for free: https://homechart.app
|
| For recipes, Homechart can import recipes from the web and gives
| you an "I'm feeling lucky" button that randomizes recipes for a
| meal plan based on parameters like when it was last made or
| specific tags. For our users, this seems to work well and let's
| them curate their recipe collection.
| dang wrote:
| Hey, it's already a bit delicate to post about your company in
| someone else's launch thread, but I'd say it's over the line to
| do it in a putdown sort of way, so please don't. It's not in
| the spirit we're trying for here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| (Just to be clear, although the OP is about a YC startup, for
| sure the same applies in anybody's launch thread.)
| cschiller wrote:
| Looks like a great software product for household management!
|
| What we learned is that when it comes to dinners, many decision
| makers in the household struggle with making the decision every
| week about what to eat for the next few days. The randomized
| recipe button seems to go into that direction. However making
| relevant suggestions is what we learned so far to be a key in
| the experience (e.g. considering the current season, what was
| for dinner in the past week, what is similar to a favorite dish
| but with a new twist, etc.)
|
| From our existing users we get the feedback that a personalized
| menu each week and a much more convenient way to order their
| groceries saves them time and mental energy. For many worth the
| price. Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works.
| Inversechi wrote:
| Not the OP but from my understanding their VP is they take care
| of the integration with all the grocery services to order the
| food required for the recipes.
|
| Sounds like they also do nice additions such as using the
| influx of quick grocery services to order the missing bits from
| the traditional grocery delivery platforms.
| mrkentutbabi wrote:
| Wow, I've been trying to make the same thing for my wife.
|
| Guess what is my name? yup.
| chrtng wrote:
| One of the Christian's here :) Christian would suggest itself I
| guess?
| spieden wrote:
| Just a quick nit: Safeway is improperly pluralized as "Safeways"
| some way down the home page. Cool idea and interested to try!
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| What's the correct way to pluralize Safeway?
| cschiller wrote:
| Good spot! Will amend that asap. Thanks for the kind words
| though! Look forward to serving you.
| ichydkrsrnae wrote:
| I've thought about this myself, but it's an idea before its time
| that will fight a desperate fight against one big problem:
| quality. Quantity is easy. Quality is hard. People who cook for
| themselves want to choose the ingredients that go into what
| they're cooking. That's often the reason people cook for
| themselves: I decide what goes in my body.
|
| I really, really want to know if the green bell pepper has three
| lobes or four, because they taste completely different. The
| person being paid minimum wage to shop for my bell pepper
| couldn't care less, but the wrong choice will ruin my meal. The
| convenience of someone else shopping for you, while helpful, is
| racked with such problems of selection, quality, availability,
| etc.
|
| The problems created by people shopping for me, at least in my
| experience, significantly offset the convenience.
|
| How to determine quality will become a very big deal in
| technology in our lifetimes. What's real? What's good? What's
| legit? I guess it already is. Look at the collasal cesspool that
| is Amazon. What do I buy? I don't know. I don't know what's good.
|
| In 20 years, your bananas will text you that they're ripe and you
| should eat them, especially because your potassium is low. In
| fact, the bananas will order themselves. But today, with the
| quality problems so thick with muck and subterfuge, I can't even
| get the correct bell pepper delivered.
|
| This quality problem is why Amazon bought Whole Foods and is
| about to go brick and mortar countrywide. You just can't solve
| quality problems with intermediaries at this stage of the game
| because those intermediaries have no incentive to care.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Are four lobed ones really sweeter?
| soperj wrote:
| I tried a blind taste test, and the answer from my
| perspective was no.
| ichydkrsrnae wrote:
| I only use the green ones. The three lobed ones are strong
| up, the four lobed ones are milder. No theory on the
| sweetness, but then I don't use the red, orange, or yellow
| ones very often. Maybe like garlic? Young garlic super
| strong, mature less so?
|
| The male versus female bell pepper nonsense is just that,
| nonsense. My mother thinks it's all nonsense, but she's
| wrong.
| cschiller wrote:
| True, the picking quality is a big factor for the experience.
| Especially when it's about shopping for ingredients for a meal.
| We try to improve this by placing the order on behalf of the
| customer, so we can optimize the product selection for the
| cooking experience and have the option to guide the pickers
| with comments/chat towards the most appropriate products or
| suitable substitutes if something is out of stock.
|
| Besides that we are considering to give the user an option to
| simply export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used
| for offline shopping. We got this a few times as a feature
| request from users who like to shop the ingredients themselves,
| but still like a service which provides them with personalized
| suggestions each week and generates a combined shopping list.
| spiderice wrote:
| > we are considering to give the user an option to simply
| export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used for
| offline shopping
|
| The fact that this isn't included already is a bit of a red
| flag for me. It's a meal planning service that won't even
| give me the list of ingredients if I want to buy them myself?
|
| Besides that, it does look interesting. I may sign up for a
| free trial after showing it to my wife and seeing if she'd
| find good utility in it. We've done grocery delivery for
| about a year, but we're on the verge of stopping. So having
| an exportable list of ingredients is obviously a must before
| I get too attached to your service.
| hans863 wrote:
| Yes, do this and I'll sign up. I live in Berlin and live next
| door to an edeka. I'm happy to do the shopping myself for
| fresh food every day after work. All I need is a shopping
| list in my phone that I can pull up from my phone when I head
| downstairs to buy food.
| iandanforth wrote:
| How do you compare to platejoy? I find their idea good but the
| workflow frustrating.
|
| I pay for plantoeat but their grocer integration is pretty poor.
|
| Edit: Also I should note that "free" trials that automatically
| start charging are becoming illegal in Europe for good reason.
| It's a dark pattern we've just gotten used to. You should avoid
| that model. One reason I've stayed with plantoeat is that they
| don't auto-renew. I consciously choose every year to renew my
| subscription.
| cschiller wrote:
| Platejoy and plantoeat are great products!
|
| We focus on two things which I believe set us apart: (1)
| creating personal suggestions each week based on your
| preferences, diets and goals, which are currently reviewed and
| curated by real chefs (2) taking care of placing the order for
| you with your favorite grocer. Meaning the order process for
| you is seamless. You simply choose the meals you would like to
| cook, and any other specific products (like beverages, snacks,
| etc.) and place your order with 1 click.
|
| We've found that this combination solves a bunch of problems
| existing solutions still have from a user perspective.
|
| Thanks for the point about the auto-renew. I can personally
| relate to this. We decided to go for the auto-renew on a
| monthly basis, meaning our users can cancel anytime with
| limited downside and without the need to commit to long time
| spans. But we'll definitely take another look at the opt-in
| models, thanks for the hint!
| daanng wrote:
| what about Emeals or Mealime or Mealboard or PrepDish or
| Yummly or Prepear or Eat This Much?
| DantesKite wrote:
| I hope you succeed. I believe this space is massive. Especially
| considering the permutation space of recipes and how nobody has
| tackled the problem well, even though thousands have tried.
|
| But maybe with food delivery, it's a problem that can be
| successfully tackled since you'll get feedback on customers.
| That's a sweet data pipeline.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words! And yes, indeed we feel that the
| combination with delivery services makes a significant
| difference. By improving the inspiration experience _and_ doing
| the related shopping on your behalf, we're trying to deliver a
| smooth and successful cooking and dinner experience without the
| hassle. We believe that this is critical for a service like
| ours.
|
| And in addition, as you pointed out, with each order we learn
| from the integrated shopping about the user's preferences which
| enables us to continuously improve the service over time.
| DantesKite wrote:
| There's also a nonzero chance 10 years from now, automation
| and object recognition will improve fast enough that robots
| can essentially do certain (or most) aspects of cooking.
|
| And if that's true, the advantage will go to the company that
| is ready for it.
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| Hi! I feel like I'm part of your target demographic. I almost
| signed up, but a few things stopped me.
|
| * I echo that free-trial-rollover-to-paid is off-putting
|
| * I can't seem to find information about the people who are
| putting together your recipes. Who are they? Where are they from?
| Where have they cooked?
|
| * I also can't seem to find UI information about your app.
| Particularly, how easy is it to regenerate meals? Is nutritional
| information shown?
|
| * What guarantees are there that if I save a recipe, that it will
| continue to be saved? (i.e. for your 2nd party recipes, what if a
| C&D comes in or you lose the license?)
|
| * What import/export features are there in the App? Can I load in
| my own recipes that will be included in your rotation? Can I
| export your recipes into 3rd party utilities or into a markdown
| format?
|
| Any one of these is mild, but taken together it walked me away
| from signing up for the free trial. I'm actively looking for
| products in this space and I'm 100% willing to pay $10/mo to
| remove the dinner frustrations from my life.
|
| The featuresets I'm looking for:
|
| * Recipes by high-trust sites and chefs (NYT, seriouseats, etc.)
|
| * Easy meal generation (echo all of your points above and in this
| thread!)
|
| * Easy meal re-generation
|
| * Individual recommendation controls (thumbsup/thumbsdown
| individual recipes)
|
| * Avoiding vendor lock-in (easy recipe import/export in a sane
| data format)
|
| * Cross-platform (mobile ios/android, mac, linux, web)
|
| * (Bonus) open-source
|
| One technical question, how are you handling meal collation? I'd
| love to see your high-level technical stack there. Any ML?
| Individual recipe linking? Very curious :)
| cschiller wrote:
| Thank you for your structured and helpful feedback!
|
| Let me try to cover some of the points:
|
| - We have a small team of passionate foodies producing their
| own recipes and reviewing/curating weekly recommendations for
| our users. The team has an international background (incl.
| US/EU/Asia), which helps to tap into various experiences when
| it comes to generating the weekly menus. They have worked at
| some of the most popular European recipe apps. Feel free to
| check out our Instagram account to explore some of the recipes
| they have produced so far
| (https://www.instagram.com/kitchenful/)
|
| - We provide our users with a personal menu each week. In
| addition there is the option to choose from standard categories
| and your own favorite recipes. Currently it's not possible to
| import your own recipes, but we have it in the backlog. So far
| this hasn't been a blocker for our users to use our service on
| a weekly basis.
|
| - As of now we don't have a feature to export the recipes.
| Mostly because so far we didn't get that request from our
| users. But I see the peace of mind value in it as a user and
| will look into this.
|
| - We are building our frontend clients with Flutter. So we look
| forward to supporting many platforms (iOS, Android, Web, Mac,
| Linux, ...) soon, stay tuned.
|
| - Currently we are working with custom ranking and rotation
| algos for the recipe collation. But ML definitely on the
| horizon as we increase the number of data points :)
|
| Happy to ping you once we have implemented a bit more features
| on the multi-platform and recipe import/export side. Excited to
| get your early feedback then.
| onion2k wrote:
| _We never managed to meal plan a couple of days in advance..._
|
| I'm a little envious of founders who think this way. You've taken
| a problem you faced and turned it into an opportunity, which is
| awesome. Faced with the same problem I am certain I'd simply have
| tried to learn to "be more organised", and likely have failed and
| carried on with the same problem for a long time. Even if I
| thought it was a problem lots of other people face I doubt I'd
| have actually executed on an idea of solving it; I don't see my
| "failures" as viable problems to turn into businesses.
|
| There's a lesson here for me (and probably many others) that you
| don't always have to look for big problems or complex problems to
| find viable startup ideas. Sometimes it can be something simple
| that just bugs you. I wish you the best of luck.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thank you for it being so well said!
|
| The beauty of it is that everyone is likely to face or notice
| problems in their own life which offer the chance to be solved.
| And usually one is not the only one facing it :)
|
| Hopefully this inspires someone to solve a problem which nags
| them and which they can get passionate about.
|
| We are excited about the opportunity to work on this problem.
| And are grateful for the constructive feedback we are receiving
| from the HN community.
| doosomah wrote:
| Great idea! I wrote some code to generate nutritionally complete,
| minimalist diets. It got some traction, but I never managed to
| integrate it with recipes/prices. lkm if you want to try to
| integrate it.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thanks! Generating nutritionally complete, minimalist diets
| sounds super interesting. Feel free to link it here or write to
| me at cs@kitchenful.com so we can take a look.
| doosomah wrote:
| Email sent!
| ph0rque wrote:
| I've been working on something similar as a small project, as
| well: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2021/04/more-complete-
| nutriti...
|
| Would love to chat/exchange thoughts!
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| n33dfood.com
| cschiller wrote:
| stay tuned :)
| mbg721 wrote:
| With all this inadvertent mention of Christianity, one thing that
| did come to mind is seasonal dietary requirements--Catholic and
| Orthodox needs for Fridays and for Lent. I don't think the big
| meal services really address that, but it's not as difficult
| logistically as e.g. Kosher food, so it could be a useful market.
| PaulSec wrote:
| What's the difference with Jow?
| cschiller wrote:
| Main difference is the strong focus on your preferences, diets,
| and goals. We use a combination of our own produced recipes, as
| well as recipes from food creators we work with. This allows us
| to tap into a wide range of different meals from the start and
| tailor the weekly recommendations to each individual.
|
| On top of the personalization, we also have a different order
| process in which we take care of finding the best substitutes
| in case something is out of stock, and then provide you with
| personalized cooking instructions after the order.
|
| Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works for
| you.
| koevet wrote:
| Jow (https://jow.fr/) seems to be a France-only service.
| chris_st wrote:
| Good luck -- looks nice!
|
| I had the "What do I make for dinner?" conundrum too, and wound
| up making my own web app to address that. The main thing for me
| was that I couldn't think of any recipes, other than ones I'd
| already made very recently.
|
| So mine is kind of a diary, in that I record whatever we make
| today, and then I can see what we've made over the last couple of
| years, and get inspiration that way. It also has a "Future" list,
| where I can add things I want to make in the future.
| malfist wrote:
| Is your webapp sharable? That sounds handy
| chris_st wrote:
| Sorry, no, not at the moment. It wasn't a big deal to write.
| cschiller wrote:
| This sounds like a great hack! Personally we faced a kind of
| cold start problem with such a diary. So what we're trying now
| with Kitchenful is to recommend new recipes that are similar to
| a few favorite dishes of our users, which we ask about in the
| onboarding process.
|
| We like the idea of a "Future" list and are already thinking
| about a bookmarking / recipe import feature. How do you save
| future ideas in your app? (urls?)
| chris_st wrote:
| It's a database-backed app, so it's just a marker in the
| database.
|
| I understand the cold-start thing about the "diary" feature,
| but I think it'd be nice to have a list you could look back
| on of everything you've made, with notes on how you liked it,
| what you'd change, etc. That's been a big win for me.
| Inversechi wrote:
| Sounds like an interesting proposition by integrating directly
| with existing supermarkets like REWE and Edeka.
|
| Any plans to jump on the < 30 min delivery services, e.g.
| Gorillas/Getir/Flink/Weezy etc to get me the produce for a meal
| now?
|
| Greetings from BER
| cschiller wrote:
| Great question! So far we've experimented with the quick
| commerce players mostly to cover for out of stock items from
| the bigger grocers. E.g. if the grocer was out of tomatoes at
| the point of delivery, we offer our users the option to have
| the out of stock item delivered by a quick commerce service
| around the same time of the main delivery.
|
| The majority of our current users seem to prefer one big
| grocery delivery per week. Because the benefit of having the
| planning and shopping done a few days in advance means that it
| prevents decision making on the other days.
|
| Having said that, we believe that shorter times from planning
| to actual delivery are still key in the user experience. So
| same day delivery and pickup options by the grocers help to
| improve the overall experience.
| Inversechi wrote:
| That's an amazing way to leverage in those awkward situations
| when the traditional grocery shops fail to deliver (which
| happens a lot from experience).
|
| Will be def signing up to this service at some point.
|
| p.s. I reported a bug to the email listed on your home page.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thank you! Looking forward to serving you in the near
| future.
| tlackemann wrote:
| I absolutely love this idea, I hope it bears well for you all.
|
| Services like BlueApron, etc have way too much plastic waste,
| giving people a similar experience while letting them do the
| shopping (or not, I like the instacart integration) is a great
| idea.
|
| Good luck!
| cschiller wrote:
| Thanks! Having less packaging waste is actually one of the
| points our early customers who'd used a Meal Kit service before
| like about Kitchenful.
| coffeedoughnuts wrote:
| There's no indication anywhere that this works for UK customers -
| other than some logos part way down the page for Ocado, Waitrose
| and Sainsbury's (all UK only AFAIK) and there's no context to the
| logos...
|
| Does this work in the UK?
| cschiller wrote:
| Sorry for the confusion with the UK logos. Unfortunately we're
| not operating in the UK yet but are definitely looking into it.
| nend wrote:
| As a potential US customer, I was also a bit put off by this.
| Do you support all US zip codes? What kind of recipes would I
| be able to order if I sign up, assuming the availability is
| partly based on my delivery address?
|
| The free trial requires a credit card, I don't want to give
| you my credit card without an assurance that you have food I
| want to pay for, or that you'll be able to deliver to me.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Very helpful for us to think about
| how we can showcase our service before the sign-up event
| and remove the uncertainty related to location.
|
| Do you mind me asking: in terms of food, what would be most
| important to you before signup? Is it to see the quality of
| the recipes, or rather a test if we can make good
| recommendations based on your specific preferences and
| needs?
| koevet wrote:
| Cool idea, I had a similar hitch to scratch and have been playing
| with the idea to build something like that (for personal use, but
| ended up using https://hay-kot.github.io/mealie/). I'm in Berlin
| and I wasn't aware you guys were already operational here.
|
| A couple of notes: I signed up for the trial and answered the
| questionnaire. To me, it is not clear what happens next. I didn't
| receive any welcome/confirmation email.
|
| Also, since I'm based in Germany, I would have expected a
| reference to German supermarkets (Rewe, Edeka, etc.) but the home
| page only shows American stores. For a moment, I thought this was
| a US-only service.
|
| Good luck and looking forward to try out the service.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback and apologies for any confusion! The
| lack of clarity about the next step after signing up is our
| bad, we are currently working on making the process clearer.
| Happy to see Berlin users here!
| aleksi wrote:
| > We have now started serving US customers.
|
| It is not clear from the website. I expected to see a list of
| countries somewhere, maybe even after clicking a Try Free button.
| But it seems to be happy to accept a credit card from any
| country.
| cschiller wrote:
| Thanks for the idea! We used https://ipapi.com/ at the start to
| render different page content based on the country of the
| visitor. But like the idea of making this clearer on the
| homepage in general, because an ip address lookup might not be
| accurate and hard if there is no way for the user to influence
| / change the language/location.
| tethys wrote:
| For me, some paragraphs are in German, some are in English.
| Really weird.
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