fridgecheck

[Ivan Majstorovic]

Hello,

my name is Ivan Majstorovic, and i am one of founders of www.fridgecheck.com.

We are creating aplication that will provide you recepie from items that you have in your fridge. ( Other way around than usual! )

We have over 6000 recepies at the moment, and since we are in beta, we would realy appriciate feedback from you guys, what to improve, and how to easy sharing recepies with cooking society.

So please, let me know what do you think about my project

Thank you in advance!

[gfweb]

Interesting idea. Might be fun. Quality of recipes will be key. I wouldn't just use any crap recipe that you don't KNOW is good. Must have been tested by a reliable source eg Epicurious.

[Ivan Majstorovic]

We will try to create, provide 5-10 tested recepies per day in near future

For now we have target to make steps in curent recepies ... like step 1. step 2 . ... etc

[Lisa Shock]

The business of allowing anyone who registers to submit recipes is bound to lead to something halfway between trouble and mediocrity. As things stand right now, most recipe sites are worthless compilations of substandard recipes with a healthy dose of copyright infringement mixed in. I'd worry about both poor recipes and handing copyright infringement.

Right now, I only trust a few sites for recipes: Epicurious, Cook's Illustrated, Food & Wine, a few newspaper sites like the Washington Post & NYT, and chef's personal websites.

Have you thought about partnering with Eat Your Books? They have the copyright part down cold, and tons of recipes.

[Ivan Majstorovic]

Hey Lisa,

i definitly agree about todays problem with copirights, and badly written recepies (even we have some bad one recepies in this collection), thats why at this point we are having alot of NO IMAGE pictures instead of making copyright break. I guess Eat Your Books will be great idea! I will try to contact them to see what we can do!

Thank you for good tip!

[liuzhou]

Your site is bizarre. I enter my ingredients as duck, ginger, garlic and lemon.

I am referred to recipes for "Moroccan spiced fish with ginger mash", "Moroccan-style chicken", "Stir fried pork strings with hot sauce", "Ma Po Tofu", "Pork with Broccoli in Oyster Sauce" etc. Not a duck in sight! Utterly useless.

You are the second person here in a week to tout this idea of a recipe finder site. There are already dozens on the internet, nearly all better than this.

I find the best is Google. A search for the same ingredients on Google gives me loads of recipes with duck in them!.

Don't reinvent the wheel.

[Ivan Majstorovic]

Well if you enter only Duck on first place - you will se that at this point for beta testing - we onley have like 8 recepies with duck.

Thats why you dont see recepies with duck and all ingredients that you have placed

It is all about playing with ingredients, and on the end get to real recepies and delicious food

Btw liuzhou, what is that another site with that idea? Can you point me at it?

But that gave me another idea, about adding primary ingredient filter

Thanks

[liuzhou]

Quote

It is all about playing with ingredients, and on the end get to real recepies and delicious food

I prefer to play with the ingredients I have rather than totally irrelevant ingredients I don't.

we onley have like 8 recepies with duck

So why do none of them turn up in the results?

Btw liuzhou, what is that another site with that idea? Can you point me at it?

https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=recipe+finder&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest

As I said, I find Google is the best. You do know Google, don't you?

Edited August 22, 2013 by liuzhou (log)

[Ivan Majstorovic]

you are the second person here in a week to tout this idea of a recipe finder site.

On that i was refeering

And try typing just Duck - then it will show up recepies with duck , and if you do not match that - it will not show you. But in your case i guess it should be somewheere below in 1/X of matched ingredients. (further down in page results)

Let me check out and get to you with details

Edited August 22, 2013 by Ivan Majstorovic (log)

[liuzhou]

So you are saying you can only search for one ingredient. If I search for duck I will find it. If I search for duck and garlic, I get recipes for fish! How very useful!

I couldn't even get to anything except the first page of results. The links didn't work.

Have you actually looked at the competition?

Edited August 22, 2013 by liuzhou (log)

[Ivan Majstorovic]

liuzhou, i am saying that this is beta, and we are still in process of modifying and changing things in spirit of optimising this for best UX.

What would you do to improve this?

[liuzhou]

What would you do to improve this?

To be honest, I'd abandon it. As I have said several times, there are dozens of sites doing the same and doing it better,.and Google does it better than most of them.

Saying it is a beta is no excuse. A beta site is usually for ironing out slight minor problems, not discovering total malfunctions.

Why don't you do something new?

Edited August 22, 2013 by liuzhou (log)

[dcarch]

"---We are creating aplication that will provide you recepie from items that you have in your fridge. -----"

Almost everyone has the same foods in the refrigerator, fish, chicken, beef, pork, lettuce, spinach, butter, -----------.

It is the seasonings/spices which can make interesting recipes.

It is what kind of appliances you have that can make these interesting recipes.

If your site can give me good recipes for the following input, I would pay to use you site, otherwise I Google:

• Bottom round beef
• garlic, pepper, salt, ketchup, butter, scallion, carrots, beer
• Stove, microwave, sous vide cooker, wok

dcarch

[OliverB]

I'm not sure I'd ever use this, I either google, use the flavor bible if really stuck, or open one of the many books I have. I might even remember that I entered some in eatyourbooks a long time ago, but I never use that site either.

as a side note, I'm pretty sure you can not copyright recipes, images etc are of course a whole other story.

There's one way I could see something like this work, I scan everything I put in the fridge into an app AT the fridge, also enter what I might have in spices, cans, etc and maybe at initial setup add what cooking options I have (stove, oven, SV, grill, etc). Then I scan my what ever when I want to make it and suggestions show up. But even then, I'm pretty sure I'd already be washing dishes by the time I found a recipe I never made, found all the things I need, etc.

It is a neat idea, but maybe instead of trying to have tens of thousands of recipes, have flavor suggestions or combination suggestions for people to run with. I can't see how you could possibly compete with google here?

[gfweb]

I just googled some "french bread, sirloin, green beans" and got a few recipes of unknown quality, but mostly noise. An app that cuts through that wouldn't be a bad thing.

[annabelle]

Oliver B, you can copyright recipes.

[gfweb]

Not so sure about that. You can copyright unique processes and the printed page but not the ingredient list and instructions, I've been told.

[annabelle]

Perhaps one of the lawyers here could clarify? It's been forever since I took any business law so it may be that I'm misremembering.

[Lisa Shock]

The ingredient list cannot be copyrighted, but the instructions can. That's why you see people posting recipes here often times as just ingredients lists.

Here's a review of 6 refrigerator content management apps.

Tastebud, an app debuting in 2010, reviewed.

Here's a review of 20 apps that allow you to enter ingredients in the fridge to find recipes.

After a bit of looking around, all of the major recipe sites have apps that allow you to enter ingredients and find recipes. These sites include: Epicurious, Big Oven, Martha Stewart, and Allrecipes.com's Dinner Spinner which won an award from Time Magazine for being one of the top apps of 2012. Looks like all of the major content (recipe) providers already have their own apps or participate in an app program. I can't see this working because you're going to need to develop a HUGE library of new/unique recipes to compete.

[OliverB]

as far as I know a recipe can't be copyrighted. You'd have a really hard time to figure out if nobody ever before printed the same recipe also, thus making your recipe potential infringement. Special instructions and the text of your book are of course copyrighted, which is probably part of the reason we see many books with little stories with recipes etc. But you can't copyright "saute the onions until translucent" etc.

I'm sure you also can't go and rewrite modernist cuisine, as with a lot of copyright, there's a lot of grey between the black and white. But a simple recipe can't be copyrighted, a million books would be infringing on each other with pasta or cake or bbq etc recipes.

Back to topic, I think the idea is neat, but it's not new, has been done before, and to pull it off successfully would require a lot of work and money IMO. Nobody I know would subscribe or pay for such a site, unless it's a small one time pay like for an app.

Not to say it's impossible, but a lot of research needs to be done before even starting such a site I think. Maybe they did it, I don't know. But beating all the ones Lisa posted and all the recipes google etc finds you is going to be very hard. I haven't even used eat your books in a long time, too many books I own were not indexed and sometimes the results were not useful to me. And I entered a lot of books.

You'd also need a lot of advertising to get the word out and even more advertising on the site to make it feasible as a business. We haven't even touched the ask your friends on Facebook option etc yet either.

Just my thoughts on it, would be interesting to hear what the OP has to bring in now?

Edit to add a bit from the government:

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

Edited August 23, 2013 by OliverB (log)

[Lisa Shock]

Essentially the app doesn't provide much value unless it references excellent recipes. Making the software and the just expecting high quality content to fall into place from nowhere is going about it backwards. Especially since pretty much all of the existing recipe websites around the world already have functions to search for combinations of ingredients on hand. To make your app stand apart from the dozens of established competitors, you'll need to source unique recipes.

I get the impression that the OP is a software developer, not the head of a large test kitchen that will run experiments hundreds of times before publishing a single recipe. (like Cook's Illustrated does) And, probably not really prepared to run a professional test kitchen. -Thus the website allows anyone who registers to submit recipes of unknown provenance and quality. GIGO...

[annabelle]

The OP makes this sound like a student project in graduate school. I did a similar project in B-school wherein I cross-indexed all of my huge collection of cookbooks by recipe type and style of cooking. It was a right pain in the ass. I would think there is some sort of existing library format search index that does the same thing in addition to the links Lisa has provided. At in any rate Epicurious, et al, have massive databases that have been extant for more than a decade. That's centuries ago in the world of software development.

I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, just a realist. Best of luck to you!

[Ivan Majstorovic]

Thank you All for your replys sugesstions, we are now making more improvements in segment of recipie quality, and UX. I will keep you updated when we have something new and cool

And if you wish to participate in Aplication for Android and iPhone, please send mail to food at fridgecheck.com for beta app. (This week on menu is Android version )

Thnak you once again

[Ivan Majstorovic]

Ok back with some news

here is mobile aplication for Android - closed beta - www.fridgecheck.com/android/fridgecheck.apk

So if you have android - try it

and please do not forget to give us feedback for it on beta @ fridgecheck dot com

We would be very thankfull for it!