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Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

eatthismuch.com

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Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#101

Post by w1ntermute »

papa_bear wrote: post #79
blocke wrote: post #58

Oh wow. Simply wow. I've wanted this without knowing I've wanted it. This probably sounds sad but the effort and potential anxiety required in trying to pick the right foods and what I might want to eat often means I just get lazy and eat out instead. A case where having an astounding number of options often leaves one wanting to pick none of the above. This is a great idea. Edit: Mobile website please!

I'm the same way with the food picking anxiety, except I'm also really stingy at the same time so I'll often be too lazy to eat anything at all. That was the main inspiration for starting on a diet generator - to make it easier for me to gain weight. Definitely going to work on a mobile version of the site soon!

The site doesn't seem to include drinks. Do you plan on adding them?

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#102

Post by papa_bear »

physcab wrote: post #78

This is pretty marvelous. I have always wanted to create something like this, but the details have always seemed daunting to me. I couldn't think of a way of merging recipes I liked with nutritional facts and then assembling building blocks for meal plans automatically without a ton of manual labor in data entry. Are these recipes crowdsourced? Have you just been taking copious nutritional notes for a while? If you f…

You're right that there's a lot of work before having even something basically functional - the first version of the site only had about 50 foods to pick from that I entered by hand, all very basic (e.g. ground beef, avocado), and it would throw them at you in a random combination. Then I found the USDA food database, but their formatting is a mess and I spent a couple weeks cleaning it up by hand. The recipes are almost all crowdsourced, and it's probably one of the site's weakest points right now since there aren't a ton of them.

I'd definitely like to integrate with a larger recipe site, but the biggest issue is matching their ingredients to the USDA foods to accurately guess the nutrition - tying it to individual foods rather than just importing the recipe's nutrition makes it easy for users to modify the recipes if they want. I'm working on some stuff to make it happen though, so hopefully soon!

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#103

Post by pratikjhaveri »

if it's any help, would love to host the site on hpcloud.com (hp's public cloud). drop me a line if you're interested pratik.jhaveri(at)hp.com. Not saying this is an issue with your hosting provider - but perhaps it could help.

* I work in the hpcloud team. this post does not reflect HP's needs/opinions.

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#104

Post by deskglass »

When I set my meal options to only show vegan meals, my recommended protein intake went from at least 101 g to at least 61 g. If anything, being vegan requires me to eat slightly more protein (assuming plant proteins are harder to digest than animal proteins). While it's harder to get protein as a vegan, I don't think that means the protein goal should be lowered.

Also, I agree with others that you predict user behavior very well.

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#105

Post by greghinch »

This is pretty neat and well executed.

But does the algorithm work on meal combinations that make sense? Two of my generated meals, one was chocolate mousse with a side of bacon & tomatoes, and the next meal was beef stew with a side of fruit salad. Those things may make sense to eat together by raw data, but in all practical sense they sound like pretty terrible meals...

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#107

Post by bernz »

papa_bear wrote: post #55
bernz wrote: post #34

So I started developing something remarkably similar about 4 years ago (in Django, too!). Wrote up a business plan with monetization, p&l, etc. I brought the plan and prototype to a few seed folks for early funding before I admittedly lost interest and moved onto something else. The hardest technical challenge I had was, knowing there would need to be a ton of recipes in the system to make it truly effective, I had t…

You're totally right about the pains with ingredients normalization - I've spent at least two months making scripts to scrape recipes, and it will only match the ingredients accurately about 80% of the time, leaving a lot of work in hand curating everything it scrapes. I ended up trying to promote users to enter recipes by offering a month free every time they entered 5 good recipes. I built up a decent recipe databa…

Yeah, my ratio was about 80% and given the volume of recipes I wanted, that wasn't good enough. So I started coding an normalization solution that would highlight questionable recipes and make it easy to reformat them with structured data, but even that was really hard. It was honestly around that time that I lost interest and ditched the project.

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#108

Post by wmeredith »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #43
papa_bear wrote: post #39

The servers are getting hammered right now! If you sign up, the automatic weekly planner starts running right away to make a week of meal plans for you, but it's running very slowly at the moment - sorry about that, and if you give it a couple minutes, it should send you an email when it's done. You can use the in-browser planner to make plans more quickly, but they won't have the leftovers planned out from day to da…

Don't be embarrassed; HN has taken down far simpler, yet more famous sites than yours. I am very impressed it is still standing at all.

Yeah. I just bookmarked it for later, because this has me really excited! Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

#109

Post by ericd »

pratikjhaveri wrote: post #103

if it's any help, would love to host the site on hpcloud.com (hp's public cloud). drop me a line if you're interested pratik.jhaveri(at)hp.com. Not saying this is an issue with your hosting provider - but perhaps it could help. * I work in the hpcloud team. this post does not reflect HP's needs/opinions.

I think part of the problem is getting many times normal traffic and not being provisioned for that :-)
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