Among other things, March 2020 changed my household’s food habits.
Before Covid, I often shopped at the Trader Joe’s across from my office on Market Street. On Monday nights, it was so packed and busy that the checkout line snaked through every aisle of the store. Half-browsing / half-queueing, I followed the emergent store protocol of getting on line straight away and adding items to my basket as I passed each section. On weekends, my husband Dan and I would stroll through Whole Foods, Mollie Stone’s or the farmer’s market, picking up whatever looked good that week.
As college students, neither of us especially enjoyed cooking but as adults, it’s grown on us. Over time, we were exposed to more delicious food and more approachable cooking education. My dad gave me Salt Fat Acid Heat as a gift. Dan got The Food Lab from a friend. My college roommate introduced us to the zany (and later, as we learned, problematic) world of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen on YouTube. After we expanded our palates (I admit I arrived at the very basic “vegetables can be delicious, too” realization embarrassingly late) and learned the foundations, we started to actually enjoy our cooking routine.
Of course, Covid upended that routine. Going to the grocery store, previously a frequent and somewhat absent-minded activity, now meant preparing to wait in long lines outside and to risk exposing ourselves to the virus inside. We’d never used face masks before and we couldn’t find any available in stock, so we improvised with T-shirt rags. Instead of wandering over whenever we were out of something or going out to eat, we suddenly had to be intentional and strategic. And we became more acutely aware of just how much work all of it was.
The dance
What are we buying? What are we cooking? What haven’t we made in a long time? Where did we find that recipe? Who wrote it again? What did we say we would do differently next time? Does it take a long time to prepare? How many dishes will we dirty? Which stores will we need to go to? How much do the ingredients cost? If we buy the ingredients now, how long will they stay fresh? Will we have extra produce? What else can we make with that this week before it goes bad? How much should we make? Can we stretch it into leftovers for lunch? Will it be filling? Healthy? Appetizing to look at? Delicious? Delicious to both of us?
Will it be worth the effort?
We rinsed and repeated this exercise until we had a week’s worth of meals planned and grocery lists collated, then trudged off for our socially distanced Sunday shop.
Food is a delight
In forcing us to mealplan and shop more intentionally, Covid explicitly highlighted something for us that we had grown to implicitly believe. If we were going to go to all of the trouble and expense of planning, shopping for, cooking and cleaning up after a meal, it better look and taste really freaking good. If it was good enough to make again, we wanted to improve our technique to be able to make an even better and more delicious version of it next time.
I’m a technically-minded product designer and Dan is a design-minded software engineer. Like many people who build software for a living, our first inclination was to search for an existing app to solve our problem. We wanted something to ease the mental load of organizing our food life so we could focus on the most enjoyable parts: cooking and eating. And sure, we found some options out there. But none of them did all of the things we wanted them to do and none of them matched our mental model of how we thought it should all fit together. So we decided to DIY our own.
Fits and starts
Sometime during the first Covid winter, we started exploring prototypes. By January 2021, we giddily brought our very first version to the farmer’s market. It did work… but it was just okay. We accomplished our planning and shopping tasks, but it was clunky and cumbersome to use. Recipe importing was difficult and extracting accurate grocery lists was unreliable. We drafted plenty of solutions (both design and technical), but they were very complicated and time-intensive to implement. So we it put it down for a while.
Every year or so since then, we’d pick it up again. We’d tinker, try it, pause, and try it again. Our idea of what “it” even was evolved and then evolved some more. For a while, it seemed that the juice of our little side project just wasn’t worth the squeeze.
An app for people who love to cook
A lot has changed since we first started talking about this idea. Covid brought us back home to be closer to our families in New York. AI is eating the world and dominating all digital product discourse. We finally got a pretty decent MVP working for ourselves earlier this year. And as of May, I unexpectedly have a lot of time on my hands…
So, we’re building the app we want to exist. An app for people who love to cook. An app that will organize your food life with the same care and consideration that you put into the actual act of cooking. An app that will help you plan, and shop, and experiment, and tweak, and track, and expand your cooking repertoire. And, if I do my job right, an app that will be beautifully crafted and a pleasure to use.
If you’re interested in checking out our private beta or talking to me about your food life, I would love to chat with you.
Lunch
This week for lunch, I made my favorite summer meal: “caprese salad” pasta.
See you next week!