bernz

Yeah, my ratio was about 80% and given the volume of recipes I wanted, that wasn't good enough. So I started coding an normalization solution that would highlight questionable recipes and make it easy to reformat them with structured data, but even that was really hard. It was honestly around that time that I lost interest and ditched the project.

So I started developing something remarkably similar about 4 years ago (in Django, too!). Wrote up a business plan with monetization, p&l, etc. I brought the plan and prototype to a few seed folks for early funding before I admittedly lost interest and moved onto something else.

The hardest technical challenge I had was, knowing there would need to be a ton of recipes in the system to make it truly effective, I had to do an automated intake of recipes from many places. But ingredient normalization got in the way, even with really good regex/etl practices. For instance, a recipe says, "boneless skinless chicken breast".. another says, "skinless boneless chicken breast". Some list the # of breasts. Some list pounds. Some mean the breast is split, some don't. But in order for the nutrition info to be accurate, the normalization process had to be near perfect.

I ended up "buying" the source code to "recipefox" a recipe parsing plugin for firefox (for $100 or something like that) which helped tremendously, but still wasn't good enough for my tastes. I felt like to make it all work, i needed to essentially build a recipe ETL.

The monetization was kind of cool, I felt. Free for users. I felt that companies (food companies, supermarkets, etc) would put coupons for specific brands or specific stores on printed-out shopping lists based on the weekly recipes. i actually got alot of interest from that one from actual supermarkets. Thought that was cool.

Good luck with this. It was a tremendous idea 4 years ago and I always wondered when someone else was going to do it because it just seemed so damn obvious to me.

"I have a gluten free child and a wife on a diet. What should I buy at the grocery store this week and what the hell should I make?"

Authentication is not Authorization. Sigh.