WebChef
July 1, 2022
PERSONAL
AI powered grocery list app that allows users to automatically extract ingredients from online recipes, save them for later, and create a shopping list.
The problem
At the time, there was no easy way to parse online recipes and save them for cooking later. We aimed to solve this by taking a link to an online recipe and automatically extracting the ingredients from the HTML.
What went well
The recipe/ingredient extractor was developed before LLMs were created and used a simple rule based system written in Go to extract. This worked surprisingly well and we still use this system ourselves each week for grocery shopping.
What could be improved
The main thing that could be improved is switching the ingredient parsing system to use an LLM instead. This would greatly improve the accuracy of the ingredient extraction. Enhanced UI would also go a long way as the initial UI developed was fairly rudimentary.
The future
We still feel very strongly about this idea and may go back and revisit it in the future. The competition in this area is very strong from apps like Cookbook that come with a ton of great features. However, there still may be a niche market available if we focused on addressing the main user complaints around high pricing and no family share support.