Meet Recipe to Kitchen, Winner of Startups of The Year 2024 in Seattle

Recipe to Kitchen has been awarded HackerNoon's Startups of The Year 2024 award in Seattle. Read on to learn more about us.

https://hackernoon.com/startups/north-america/north-america-seattle-wa-usa?embedable=true

Tell us about you.

Our company offers a unique recipe management app that instantly captures recipes from photos, text, URLs, or even a simple request with flawless accuracy and no need for edits. Users can then order all the ingredients for pickup or same-day delivery from their favorite local stores through Instacart, creating a seamless experience that saves time and simplifies meal planning for busy professionals, families, food enthusiasts, and anyone looking to make cooking easier and more convenient.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

With so many recipe sources right now littered with ads and click-bait, we are trying to build “The Recipe Manager” to house all your recipes. Whether you found them online, through email, or from your favorite cookbook you will always have a free place to find them. Further we have integrated with Instacart making ordering familiar and available from any store near you. Getting this weeks of groceries to your kitchen from all the recipes in your meal planner is just a few clicks.

What sets you apart from the competition?

We are free. We are the best software for turning any recipe into a digital recipe card. We are one of the few recipe management apps that allow Instacart ordering.

What does it mean for you to win this title?

We are incredibly honored by this title and surprised a recipe management app was able to do so well since it’s not a new concept, but rather how we’ve approached building from ground up using AI we’ve been able to build a high-end product with a very limited budget. These new development and technology enhancements translate to us being able to pass the savings to our users and not overwhelm them with advertising and subscription fees.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to set out for this mission?

We love learning , innovating, and working with the latest technologies to build time-saving and life-enhancing software solutions.

Looking back, what milestone was the biggest turning point for your startup?

The idea is one we’ve had for several years. The early days of machine learning and OCR created some barriers for a very small team with little to no budget. Time is our currency. The development of image input using chatGPT-4o-mini was our turning point. Once we realized how well this worked the development went from 0-60 and within 4 months we had a working product and launched within 6 months a website and mobile apps.

What’s one valuable lesson you learned this year that you’d pass on to other startups?

When developing with LLMs’ do not let them do too much. Little bits combined, rather than large tasks. Watch your costs!!

How do you envision your industry evolving in the coming years, and how will your startup stay ahead?

I feel we are the future of application development, we’ve used LLM’s to develop the code and we use LLM’s in the code as the brains behind the APIs. LLM’s (AI) are a tool. They are really powerful and just as developers had to go from book learning to using Google and stackoverflow (I wish LLM’s had a rating and options on the code it returned), we as developers need to incorporate LLM’s into our workflows. We will use these in our day to day coding and also as the brains behind our APIs. The LLM’s will mature and we will evolve with them as they do so to continue to make a better Recipe Management experience and release feature faster than our competitors.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2025?

Drive more traffic, Dog food our app, get more user feedback, get more user feedback and then we will want to get some more user feedback to see how we can enhance our features and overall offering.

2024 has been crazy, with all the new techs, and all the geopolitics fluctuations. What are the impacts of these to your startup, and to your industry as a whole? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

Hard to say but the idea of home delivery when grocery prices are going up is a real concern for us, as delivery is a luxury I imagine would be one of the first to go and this is our financial avenue, ie affiliation with Instacart.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

HackerNoon has been a nice source of articles that feel very organic. I feel like I’m getting a feel for actual development community not just a sponsored perspective.