Hearthly

From saved recipes to real meals — Hearthly imports recipes, builds shopping lists, manages your pantry, rescues your expiring pantry items, plan meals, gets you help when you need and much more.

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Inspiration

We started with a feeling many home cooks know well: excitement when you save a recipe… and guilt when it never gets cooked. Social media is full of incredible food inspiration, especially from creators like Eitan Bernath who make cooking feel joyful and accessible. But there’s a missing bridge between watching and doing.

We were inspired to build Hearthly as that bridge — a way to turn inspiration into action, and cooking into a shared community experience. Beyond convenience, we were motivated by a deeper goal: helping people waste less food, spend more intentionally, and feel supported in the kitchen. Cooking shouldn’t feel overwhelming or lonely. It should feel like being part of a warm, helpful community gathered around a hearth. The app also provide small but effective features such as scaling the recipe for portion size, reducing friction for users to start using the recipies. The app also helps to track the cost of each recipe according to the portion size.

By connecting the content creators to users and also users to a wider community, there is always help available for users. Also content creators can get a gauge of how each of their recipes are being used and if there are any challenges that users are facing when cooking it, providing valuable insights.

What it does

Hearthly is a smart cooking companion that transforms saved recipes into real meals while connecting users to a cooking community and content creators.

Users can import recipes from links or videos and instantly generate grocery lists. The app tracks pantry and refrigerator inventory, adjusts shopping lists based on what’s already available, and recommends recipes that reduce food waste.

At its heart, Hearthly is also a community platform. Users can ask cooking questions, share progress, and get help when they’re stuck. Creators like Eitan can send new recipes directly to the community, highlight trending dishes, and even respond to questions in real time. This creates a living feedback loop between inspiration and action — users don’t just watch recipes, they cook them together.

How we built it

We built Hearthly as a mobile-first MVP centered around real cooking workflows and community interaction.

The app combines a responsive mobile interface with backend services that parse recipes, normalize ingredient data, and manage pantry intelligence. AI-powered extraction converts recipe content into structured grocery items, while a recommendation engine suggests meals based on available ingredients. We layered community features on top of this foundation, enabling messaging. RevenueCat powers subscriptions that unlock advanced features and community perks. Throughout development, we focused on rapid iteration and user feedback to keep the experience intuitive and human.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was translating messy real-world cooking data into reliable digital systems. Recipes use inconsistent language and measurements, and mapping them to pantry inventory required careful normalization. Comparing to pantry items was also another challenge due to the names used by supermarkets versus what is in the recipe. Fuzzy logics needed to be implemented for comparisons.

Designing community features also introduced complexity. We wanted real-time interaction without overwhelming users, and we needed to balance automation with trust — users must always feel in control of their pantry and shopping decisions.

Finally, the scope of the vision was ambitious. Combining recipes, inventory, meal planning, costing, and community into a cohesive MVP required disciplined prioritization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of creating an end-to-end experience that genuinely helps people cook more often. From importing a recipe to standing in the kitchen with the right ingredients, Hearthly closes the gap between intention and action. We did user testing to reveal pain points which led to discovery of features such as scaling of ingredients, conversion of units, matching recipies to ingredients that are expiring soon, adding costs to track the cost of each recipe for the portion size, timer, SOS feature etc.

We’re especially proud of the community layer. By enabling users to ask for help and receive guidance from creators, we transformed the app from a tool into a shared cooking space. Hearthly doesn’t just organize recipes — it builds confidence and connection.

What we learned

We learned that cooking is deeply emotional and social. People don’t just need better tools; they need encouragement, clarity, and a sense of belonging.

Technically, we learned how complex ingredient standardization and inventory tracking can be, and how important it is to design systems that remain flexible and user-friendly. We also learned the value of building community features early, because they shape how users engage with the product.

What's next for Hearthly

Next, we plan to deepen the community experience by expanding real-time creator interactions, live cooking sessions, and collaborative meal planning. We want to enhance personalization so recipe recommendations adapt to each user’s tastes, budget, and health goals. We also have enhancements lined up to improve the accuracy of pantry matches and scale for multiple concurrent users. There is immense potential to expand the content creator section to provide insights to improve their recipies by identifying where users are find difficulties.

Our long-term vision is for Hearthly to become a trusted cooking companion and vibrant community — a place where inspiration turns into action, food waste is reduced, and people feel supported every time they step into the kitchen.

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