Sous - Recipe Pal

A digital cookbook to help you keep track of recipes from physical cookbooks to social media. Offers add to shopping list functionality, and smart recipe search to find recipes from what you have.

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Inspiration

I decided to follow Eitan's brief as it was an issue I encounter frequently whilst cooking, I have recipe books, recipe cards from meal box services, and social media recipes I want to try out. I also have the issue of picking new recipes to cook every week, and if I have chorizo, or creme fraiche left, I don't always know what next to cook, or if any of my existing recipes can utilise it.

What it does

Sous focuses on three main areas

Recipe Storage

  • Store recipes from a variety of sources, uploaded via photo, or by sharing from social media (currently Instagram)
  • View a breakdown of the recipe, its ingredients, and the cooking instructions

Grocery List

  • Add groceries from each recipe into a tickable list to help keep track of what you already have, and what you need to get

Smart Search

One of the biggest issues I've encountered is that recipes don't always match the name you expect, especially if you're following a specific author or imported recipe. Sous utilises modern search techniques to allow users to find related recipes.

For example, you may have the following recipes saved

  • Gelatin Recipe
  • Aperol Spritz Jell O shots

Neither of these specify 'Jelly' (UK Term) specifically, but with Sous' semantic understanding, these recipes appear first in your search results.

How we built it

I started by breaking down the brief into the core features I believed to be MVP worthy.

Challenges we ran into

Four weeks isn’t as long as you think, and time quickly runs away, especially if you’re spending a part of that time learning how to implement new services and functionality

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The import from socials functionality was a key feature I wanted to include in the MVP. I’d consider it a core feature of any recipe app, and it requiring threading several services together.

What we learned

When developing an MVP on a short time scale, prioritisation of features is really important, there was lots of small ‘nice to have’ ideas and plans that couldn’t make it into this version, e.g. export grocery list to an alternative note app.

Shipping an MVP isn’t about shipping the perfect app with a flawless ui.

What's next for Sous - Recipe Pal

There’s a few UI/UX features I can improve the user experience, as well as features that didn’t quite make it, such as recipe tagging and author identification, which partially made it to the backend, but ran out of time to implement in a frontend.

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