Recipe Rewind

Problem Statement  

How might we streamline the grocery list creation process for the home cook so that they can make great recipes. save more time, and waste less food? 

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Problem Background  

Cooking for ourselves at home is a vital and often highly intentional piece of the human experience. Although delivery apps, meal kits, and dining out are other choices for enjoying our meals, many people may choose to cook at home most often for many reasons. Cooking at home is often the least expensive dining option, it allows you to have more control over the ingredients you’re consuming, and in many cases, people love to cook! Within the group examined, 74% of people make more than 50% of their meals at home.

Another common piece of the human experience today is social media, more specifically content creation in the food and recipe space. The home cook now has the opportunity to level up the amount of and quality of recipes they’re exposed to, leading to more food diversity in the kitchen. More food diversity means more ingredients.

There is such a high saturation of video and print recipe content online that it can be hard to narrow in decision making on what our customer wants to make at home, as well as how they are going to execute it quickly, efficiently, affordably and enjoyably. Our user has the recipe inspiration, but a clear process to execute them in an enjoyable way is a barrier.

A common theme is that users will enjoy social media food content, and save recipes to make at home. However, currently 39% of our user base is in a state where despite saving recipes via social media, they will never or rarely execute them at home in their kitchen. The reason for this includes a variety of barriers to entry, including time, cost, lack of ingredients, and most of all at 35%, the tedious nature of planning the grocery lists.

Food content is only on the rise. Based on this and the above, there is an opportunity to optimize our customer’s path from seeing a recipe online to cooking and enjoying it in the comfort of their home.

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Research Insights

User Pain Points

We surveyed and interviewed over 30 users, and identified pain points to home cooking, excitement about recipe content from social media, and the fact the latter is a substantial piece of inspiration for the avid home cooks. The compilation of our User Stories is best summarized here: 

“As an avid home cook, I want an easier way to save recipes, funnel recipe information into my grocery lists, and have them connect to all of my platforms. With something like this, I would explore cooking new recipes more often.”

Supporting Data

• 74% of survey participants make more than 50% of their meals at home.
• 83% of survey participants expressed gaining recipe inspiration from social media, 87% of that user base indicated they “save” recipes on social media to view later. 
• 39% of that user base expressed that despite saving those recipes, they rarely if ever execute them.
• Of all of the barriers to entry of cooking new recipes at home, 35% of participants expressed their greatest barrier is the tedious nature of planning grocery lists.

Landing on the Solution

Based on the user pain points of time spent planning meals and neglecting to revisit saved recipe content on social media, I aim to provide users with a tool that acts as a digital library for saved recipe content from social media, and then accurately translates information from that recipe content into a digital grocery list.

Explanation of Solution

1. Allow users to consolidate the recipes they save on social media into a digital content library, giving them a greater likelihood to execute on those recipes at home.

2. The platform will contextualize the ingredients needed for multiple recipes saved into the digital library, and can automate them into a consolidated grocery list.

3. Scenario #1: The platform can centralize all of users’ saved digital recipes for easy access and reference. A digital library holds photo and video content from social media that allows our users easy access to all of their saved recipes.

• The why: Mitigate loss of recipe inspiration based on not being able to access the content (39% of survey participants mentioned they save recipe content online but never revisit it).

4. Scenario #2: Our platform can contextualize the ingredients needed for multiple recipes saved into the digital library, and can automate them into a consolidated grocery list.

Long range goals/intentions on this Scenario:

• Platform can categorize ingredient lists by section in the grocery store.
• User limits over buying on ingredients to mitigate cost and food waste
• User is not wasting time in the grocery store, stressed with a disorganized list

5. Scenario #3: Platform can push the grocery list into an only grocery platform (i.e. Instacart, Amazon Fresh)

• *Long range scenario, as our user assessed so far predominantly grocery shops in store.

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Mockup Image

Future Steps

A future scenario for our product after prototype is to enable the platform to push the generated grocery lists into an only grocery platform (i.e. Instacart, Amazon Fresh).

Additionally, the long range plan is to incorporate multiple social media integrations, but TikTok will act as our prototype integrations, as compared to Instagram, Pinterest, it has the least in-app organization capabilities for saved content currently.

Large scale possible problems to address may include social media integration blockers and lack of accurate grocery list automation based on video content word recognition.