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.
- Every ingredient is matched to real products across five 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.
- 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.
What’s next
A closed beta. A recent burn-down put the remaining work at fourteen issues; ten are done. What’s left is unglamorous and deliberate: graceful states when an ingredient won’t match, a mobile and dark-mode pass at 375px, an end-to-end self-test to find the friction before strangers do, and validating demand with real people before the build finishes.
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.