Parsnip - Duolingo for cooking

Hello Product Hunt 👋, I’m Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Parsnip — in short, “Duolingo for cooking”, which we’re excited to share with you today!

A bit of history

When I was growing up, my immigrant family had a diet of soda, TV dinners, and highly processed food — because we didn’t know any better. It took me a couple decades (and more effort than finishing my PhD) to learn that cooking is the fastest, cheapest, easiest, and healthiest way to eat, once you know what you’re doing. But over the last 60 years, it wasn’t just my family, but many others around the world, who have forgotten what we’re doing. We built Parsnip to solve that problem, and make learning to cook way easier for you than it was for me. And what better time to share than Thanksgiving 🦃, a holiday centered around cooking, family, and food?

How Parsnip works

The challenge of learning to cook isn’t that the information is unavailable — it’s actually all over the Internet. The problem is that if you’re just starting out, you literally can’t search for what you don’t know. And that lack of knowledge & confidence is intimidating for people who deeply desire to cook, but are afraid to waste ingredients, mess up, or serve bad food to a friend 🤮 . Parsnip lets you pick a dish you want to make and learn all the core cooking skills you didn’t know you needed. We build up your confidence even before you step into the kitchen. And Parsnip includes a tech tree of cooking skills that lets you see the progress you’ve made and what you can learn next — it’s like the fun of leveling up your character in a video game 🎮, applied to a useful real-life skill. Right now Parsnip is focused on helping beginner/novice cooks, but our goal is to expand the tech tree with more advanced skills and cuisines from all over the world. In the future, we plan to go beyond just teaching cooking skills to building the best AI meal planner in the world — one that knows what you can cook, your food preferences, and your time constraints. We’re doing this because the two biggest hurdles to cooking regularly at home are also two problems that AI is superbly equipped to help people with: (1) better knowledge acquisition (which we’re working on now) and (2) better decision making (which naturally builds atop of the data from 1). Our north star is to make cooking the easiest and most convenient way to eat. We're passionate about this because solving this problem at scale is good for people 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 and good for the planet 🌏, and the world wants this now more than ever. I’d like to thank our passionate, brilliant, mission-driven team and especially my co-founder @edwardhuang for pouring their hearts into bringing this vision to life ❤️. You all are an inspiration to me and it’s a privilege to work with you.

Please tell us what you think!

Our team will be around for the whole day, and we also have a Discord server where you can talk to us anytime! Parsnip is a work in progress, and we'd love to hear any questions, suggestions, or about your own cooking journey. And if you'd like to see what the future holds, follow us as we build in the open on Substack. Many thanks 🙏, Andrew

The idea is awesome. Will try you today in the evening. Wish you good luck! 💪

I absolutely love how this product teaches you about cooking while following a recipe, really cool idea! Am curious, how many recipes do you have available via the app today?

Very good. I would like to cook something with Parsnip

I've had Parsnip on my phone for about a month now and must say it is genuinely educational and fun to use! My main critique is that I am yet to actually cook a meal with my knowledge and I would like to be able to "get to the recipe" a bit faster. Maybe I'm just impatient, but I think if I was able to do this I would probably continue to do the quizzes as I actually make the dish. Having this experience instead of isolated "quiz" experiences without actually cooking would make me more likely to pop open Parsnip each time I decide I want to cook something (it would connect my in-app experience more closely to the kitchen, and I think it's okay to start the recipe without 100% of the quizzes completed because I don't see myself retaining all of the information anyhow and would want to go back to them - i.e. let us learn by doing and quizzing at the same time). But overall... I LOVE this concept and keep up the amazing work! We (the people who can't cook for s*%!!t) really need this app! 😂

Interesting and cool idea. Just subscribed the newsletter. It is amazing. Love the engagement chicken recipe. I have tried Ina Garten's. Now I am going to try yours. Lots of work, but it is worth it 😊

This is super cool! Out of curiosity, what's your favorite success story?

That's the good idea. I don't know another solution that would help me cook like a chef and would be simple as a, b, c. Hope you'll be the first one. Congrats! 🔥

I love this idea - congrats on the launch!

The app's awesome - congrats on the launch! Most of the currently accessible ways to learn how to cook are focused on the end result, so there's no grasp of why certain steps are done a particular way. More often than not, the creators behind the cooking content don't know themselves. Parsnip is a much needed change in the space!