Deciding what to eat can be easy, but it can also be really tough. Some of us spend what feels like hours scrolling through food delivery apps and restaurant reviews, some look inside the fridge for inspiration, while others have their life together and meal prep. And let’s not forget about the meal-kit delivery services fans.
If you’re looking to cut down on costs, get inspiration, and enjoy more wholesome home-cooked meals, that’s where an app like Manna Cooking comes in handy.
The app takes users through the meal lifecycle: from search and discovery to shopping, cooking, and sharing. You can swipe on recipes that you’re interested in making, save them for later, or swap out certain ingredients to fit your eating requirements – think gluten-free, vegetarian, or lactose intolerant. This takes away some of the work that goes into finding the ingredients of that delicious-looking meal you saw on Pinterest or Instagram.
One of the problems that prompted the makers to start working on Manna is shopping for ingredients. According to a recent consumer survey, 80% of American shoppers use recipes as their starting point for online grocery shopping. Often that means searching for each and every ingredient and manually adding it to your cart. The app bypasses this by automatically adding ingredients in the right quantities of selected recipes to your Amazon Fresh cart. The team is also working on adding new vendors.
The food-tech space seemed to be quiet for a while, but some interesting products are launching nonetheless. Take yhangry, for instance, which launched a couple of months ago as a marketplace where you can book a private chef for your dinner party for $40pp. Instacart also recently confidentially filed for an IPO, despite seeing declining sales compared to the pandemic growth it experienced.
One disclaimer: swiping through the app might make you hungry. If you’re willing to take a chance, let the makers know which recipe you’re trying out tonight.
