Hi Product Hunt! I work as a research consultant in food industry and as an individual and family nutritionist – trying to help people build better relationships with food. My clients and Instagram subscribers always ask for healthy recipes and more often – for a menu that “will solve all their problems”. But knowing that usual meal plan from a dietitian doesn’t work in a long term perspective, I decided to build a recipe app with some tools to help my clients manage their own balanced meal plan. My Instagram account has around 100K subscribers and before I started making an app I wanted to ask my audience what cooking apps they used before, what features they would like to have, what features they don’t care about and how much would they pay for an app like that. Since it was my own audience I can say that the results were quiet biased already but I saw a clear indication that around 90 percent of the people would afford to pay around 2-3 dollars if the app would help with their main problems – “what to cook during this week”, “what to cook today”. I write in Russian and my audience is mainly in Russia and similarly to users in some Asian markets – we’re not really into paying for apps if we can avoid it. So after I analysed the results of the survey I was pretty much set on the list of features and on the idea that I’m going to use Paid model other than Freemium. I have a lot of other projects, my book is coming up and I know that upselling people to buy your product would just be too much work considering my other commitments. But with keeping your app paid you have another problem – acquiring users in the first place and giving your app a “Premium” feel. To help with the latter I already had wonderful Olga Shashkova – my food stylist and cook on the team and we started to work on visual language. We ended up on having very clean and light photos and just two pictures for every recipe (front ‘portrait’ and a photo from the top). We had our hero screen using Olga’s wonderful photography with a little parallax effect and ‘Meal mixer’ – fun tool for creating a menu just for one day. And as soon as we had this demo during the Summer’18 we knew that we’re getting somewhere visually. Meanwhile we were working on our recipes – we spent about a year building our initial set of 165 recipes. We had recipes for people with different dietary requirements (vegan, vegetarian, diabetic, nut free, etc). So we wanted to make sure that we have enough recipes for each group of users. With our busy schedule we always have a feeling that we don’t want to spend the whole day on the kitchen doing some complicated recipes (lasagna always pops up to mind when we talk about it) so we kept recipes simple and also introduced a lot of what we call ‘simple snacks’ in our big spreadsheet document – recipes that require 1-5 ingredients and no cooking whatsoever. We never saw anything like that in other apps but I know how important it is to have a light healthy snack during the day. I work with families a lot and I know how important it is to build healthy relationship with food since the very young age. One of the easiest and most powerful ways to do it is to engage your kids with EVERY activity related to food. And since in our app we have tools for planning the menu, we have printable shopping list (so you can bring your kids along to the supermarket) and of course instructions for preparing dishes (both printable and in the app) – we wanted to make every one of these steps very simple and intuitive so that your kids can actually help you with everything. And we’re happy to report that a lot of parents managed to engage their kids using our app (and they share their adorable pictures with us). I hope some of you will find it interesting and maybe will even try our app in your families. Sincerely yours, Mary.

Maria Kardakova (MarysStories)

Mary's Recipes

Maker

7yr ago

Anna Filou

Nice app, cool UI :) Took a look at the recipes though and to be honest they don't excite me much. Most of them look a bit like 'baby food' to me, not sure how to explain this. I thought the "for families" part means that it's good for making a plan and for cooking for a certain number of people. There's not even a way to choose the number of portions for the ingredients though... One recipe for example says "8 portions", and if I want 1 portion, I have to do mental math (in which case I could just make food off the top of my head without using an app.)

6yr ago

Gryen Lammer

This is looking so cool and amazing recipe apps. I really love it. I want to use this app for my recipe blog.

4yr ago

Mary's Recipes

Healthy meal planner for families

Healthy meal planner for families

Mary's Recipes

Healthy meal planner for families

Healthy meal planner for families

Do you use Mary's Recipes?

Do you use Mary's Recipes?

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