Remy's Recipes

The home page of Remy's Recipes, with an interactable 3D globe with tomato-markers
The profile page for a user, showcasing different recipes that they have explored and their details
The login page
A recipe page detailing the unique story that this recipe originated from
The ingredients and instructions for a recipe detailed in a little cookbook

Inspiration

When you’re hungry and feeling down, there’s only one thing you need: comfort food from home!

This family recipe archiving platform hits a lot closer to home. Many of us in the team are international students or of migrant descent, and also live alone. As such we felt that many others can relate to the struggle of reconnecting and preserving your heritage when separated from family, as well as the struggle of learning to recreate recipes from home.

After interviewing a bunch of international students and people who live alone, we found that many others also share this sentiment. 60% of people felt that cooking for themselves can be difficult, especially when it comes to recreating recipes from home. There is also a huge portion of food content on social media online related to cooking, indicating frequent and high engagement as many people search for authentic recipes that taste like home and people to share these memories with.

We found that similar sites like recipe tineats and TasteAtlas felt a bit impersonal as those target a different niche. We also identified a lack of a unified experience for exploring and saving recipes on apps like Notion and Instagram. From this analysis, we developed "Remy's Recipes", our tech solution to finding, sharing and preserving authentic family recipes from around the globe!

What it does

"Anyone can cook!"

We made finding recipes online a simple but fun and rewarding experience! Users can search, create and save home style recipes to their account on "Remy's Recipes" with just a few clicks!

Users will first be met with a globe of the world, where each pin on the globe is a recipe originating from that region. By either clicking these pins or via the search function, users can quickly find a wide range and variations of local and authentic recipes from all over the world! They can also bookmark recipes that catch their eye, which appear in Saved Recipes to access every time they log back into their account.

Recipe creation is also super easy! Users just need to fill out the recipe template with the recipe details and instructions, select an icon and upload some images, and the recipe is ready to be shared with the world!

Food is what brings us together, therefore by preserving family recipes, we’re fostering generational human connections and sharing cultural knowledge through food!

We placed greater emphasis on storytelling and personal memories tied to food by highlighting the origins of each dish and the creator's story on every recipe overview. In the Story tab, users can find uploaded photos and the story behind the recipe, enabling them to learn about different cultures and family histories through food.

How we built it

We first concepted our idea out in storyboards and wireframes, designing a website layout that emphasises a user experience that is interactive and engaging. Then we created the user interface, overall visual design and assets on Figma. Some food images were supplemented from Canva and Unsplash before being edited by our team, while the map texture of the globe was was commissioned to a friend.

In the meantime, we asked for feedback from mentors and did some market research on our concept, adding and tweaking features to our platform in response to things we wanted to address in our project.

The website was incrementally built in the background of all this. An opensource dataset of cities, their countries and their latitude and longitude was sourced from https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities for mapping the globe with pinned recipes. Once the website designs were finalised, the website scaffolds were styled and outfitted with the assets according to the designs on Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Time management - many team members had busy schedules to coordinate around and find times to work on the project.
Mapping the latitude and longitude of the coordinates to the globe map

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re super proud of this project as we created something that speaks to our personal stories, and something that we hope will help streamline recipe finding online while connecting people to culture and history.

We’re also proud about the visual design of the website and its cosy aesthetics.

What's next for Remy's Recipes

As this is a Minimum-Viable Product, there are a few features that we thought should or could be implemented in the future!

Tweaking the Recipe Creation Preview by including greater user customisation and flexibility to support better UX in all modes.
Moderating recipes and user content ensures both safe and high community engagement, with more features that’ll allow for recipe reviews and comments.
Better dish/recipe validation; enabling users to submit recipe variations to pre-existing entries, and implementing a more robust system to handle all the new dishes that aren’t yet logged into the database.
We’d also be excited to implement a Family Recipe tree—a timeline to track not only the history of a recipe, but its development over time.