Tender — Cook on your own terms

Inspiration

I used to work as a chef. The kitchen has always been a creative space for me. A place where constraints become interesting, where you work with what you have and make something that didn't exist before. But for millions of people with sensory sensitivities (autism, ADHD, sensory processing differences) that creative space is artificially smaller than it should be. Not because they can't cook, but because every recipe tool assumes a sensory baseline they don't have. They filter by ingredient, cuisine, macro. Never by what your nervous system can handle today. That gap is what Tender tries to close.

What it does

Tender is an AI-powered recipe generator for people with sensory sensitivities. You build a sensory profile once, textures you avoid, smells that overwhelm you, taste sensitivities, preferred temperature. Every time you open the app, it asks how you're feeling today and how much energy you have. Then it invents a recipe specifically for you. Not retrieved from a database. It gives a warm explanation of exactly why this recipe works for your specific profile, on this specific day. And when you're ready, Tender gently suggests one small thing just outside your comfort zone. Because Tender doesn't just cook around your limits. It helps you move them.

How we built it

Built solo using Lovable for the frontend and powered by AI for recipe generation. The sensory profile is saved to localStorage so the app remembers you across sessions. The AI prompt is carefully designed to generate genuinely creative, culinarily sensible recipes that respect every sensory aversion and to write about them in warm, personal language that makes the user feel seen.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part wasn't the technology, it was the prompt. Getting the AI to generate recipes that are simultaneously creative, culinarily coherent, and genuinely respectful of sensory aversions required a lot of iteration. Early versions produced generic results or made strange ingredient combinations. The "expand your range" feature was particularly tricky, the suggestion has to be meaningful and specific, not just a random mild ingredient. Building solo also meant making every product and design decision alone, which was both freeing and exhausting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The "why this works for you" paragraph. When you generate a recipe and read a warm, specific explanation of exactly why this meal was chosen for your sensory profile today, that moment is what the whole product is about. It took real work to make it feel personal and not generated. Also: finishing a complete, live, working product in less then 24 hours.

What we learned

That the most important layer in an AI-powered product is the prompt. The entire user experience lives or dies on how precisely you instruct the model, a vague prompt produces generic, sometimes incoherent results. The recipe generation required very specific instructions not just to respect sensory constraints, but to produce food that people would actually want to eat. Constraints alone aren't enough, the AI needs to understand that it's cooking for a real person, not just filtering a list. UI is not decoration. Every design decision in Tender was intentional, the typography, the spacing, the way questions are asked one at a time, the warm language throughout. For neurodivergent users especially, the interface itself is part of the experience. A poorly designed UI would undermine everything the product is trying to do.

What's next for Tender — Cook on your own terms

The "expand your range" feature points toward something bigger, a tool that tracks your creative range in the kitchen over time and gently helps it grow. With enough sessions, Tender could show you patterns: what you cook on hard days, how your range has expanded over months, what new ingredients you've tried and enjoyed. The next step is a proper backend so the API key lives on a server and users never need to think about it. After that a mobile app, because this is exactly the kind of tool people reach for when they're standing in the kitchen, tired, not knowing what they can face eating tonight.

Built With

• ai-(large-language-model)
• javascript
• lovable
• react