Why I built this
I was throwing out food every week and spending too much on impulse groceries. I wanted a tool that treated the kitchen like a system — inventory in, recipes through, nutrition out — and I couldn’t find one that respected my time and my budget. So I built it.
Foodie treats your pantry as a database, your recipes as queries, and your week as a constraint. The goal isn’t another recipe app. It’s to make “what should I eat” a solved problem so the rest of life gets a little quieter.
What it does today
- Plan a week of meals, scaled to how many people you’re actually feeding.
- Build that week from a library you can search, save from, and share — or start from a sample week and change your mind later.
- Every ingredient is matched to real products across six UK supermarkets, and the whole basket is priced — so you can see which single store does your week cheapest, with nothing missing from the trolley.
- Tells you how many packs to buy per line, not just which product to pick.
- Tell it what’s already in the cupboard and those ingredients leave the basket — and leave the bill.
- Set an optional weekly budget and watch the plan track against it as you build.
- Shop from an aisle-sorted list that keeps working when the supermarket wifi doesn’t, then see what the week saved you — and what you’ve saved since you started.
What’s next
Real users. The checklist I wrote for putting Foodie in front of strangers is done: the week reads as one canvas with a single next step, a first-timer can reach a priced basket from a standing start, and there’s enough telemetry to see where someone actually falls out rather than guess.
What’s left isn’t code. I need to walk a Foodie basket through a real supermarket and log every discrepancy between the screen and the shelf, and make one deliberate end-to-end pass myself to find the friction before someone else does. Then a closed beta: five to eight people, hand-held, watched.
Held back until that ships: the optimiser proper, which takes a budget and a household profile as constraints rather than just finding the cheapest shop; promotions as a first-class input, so a Clubcard deal or a multi-buy can flip which store wins; nutrition scoring; and the mobile app, so the list is in your pocket before you leave the house.
One thing that won’t change: a basket is single-store and complete, or it isn’t offered. Sending you to three shops to save eighty pence is not a product.