It started with a shopping list.

My wife writes them. I do the shopping. Her handwriting — bless her — is illegible, and the number of times I’ve stood in an aisle trying to decode whether “fresh ginger” was actually “Greek yoghurt” is too high to admit.

I built the OCR feature first. Snap a photo of the list, get it on my phone, walk out the door. That alone would have been worth the project.

Then we wanted somewhere to keep the recipes we actually cook. Not the ones we’d save in a tab and forget. Not the ones drowning in three paragraphs of “but first, my grandmother’s herb garden in Tuscany.” The ones that earned a spot in the rotation.

Then we noticed how often we’d plan a meal, walk to the shop, and realise we already had half the ingredients at home. So we added a pantry — a simple list of what’s on the shelves, that you can also build by photo if you can’t be bothered to type. Now meal plans factor in what we actually have.

Then the hardest one: knowing what to cook when you’re tired. We added a meal planner that takes your diet, your pantry, and your schedule, and proposes a week. You can lock the plan, and the shopping list builds itself.

That’s the loop. Each piece solves an annoyance we had. None of them are AI for AI’s sake — they’re tools we use, that happen to be sped up by AI when AI helps. The whole app works without AI on. We’re stubborn about that.

If any of that sounds useful, the app is £5, one time, no subscription. We hope it earns a spot in your kitchen.