Love food, don’t know what to cook? This app can help

TinyChef is an AI-based-platform-cum app that not only suggests recipes but also helps users to purchase groceries and plan meals.

TinyChef acquired Android OS-based Zelish app in August 2021. (TinyChef)

Planning meals can be a tedious task. While for students and working professionals living alone, it can be a matter of ingredients and efforts, for homemakers and working professionals living with their families it can be about a combination of factors such as ingredients, nutrition and dietary preferences. Reasons might differ but the fact remains that planning what to eat, meal after meal day in and day out can be a bit of a challenge. And it can be particularly difficult for working professionals who are constantly juggling between their work lives and homes. Enter: TinyChef.

TinyChef is artificial intelligence (AI)-based-platform-cum app that not only suggests recipes but it also helps users to purchase groceries and plan meals based on a variety of factors including their nutritional needs, their dietary preferences, existing items in their kitchen and even the cuisine of their choice. In addition to this, users can also send their preferred recipes to their smart home devices so that they can cook along.

TinyChef was founded by Bahubali Shete and Asha Shete back in 2017 in the US with the idea of using AI to simplify people's complex and labor-intensive tasks in the kitchen. It started as a voice-first culinary AI platform that helps users in the kitchen with everything from meal planning to grocery shopping and actually cooking their meals using interactive and guided cooking experiences. Shetes along with celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor, who joined as founder in 2018, brought TinyChef to India via a skill on Amazon Alexa back in July 2019, where it has garnered over 1.5 million users. In time, it also became available on Google Assistant. But all this time, something was amiss.

TinyChef app on Google Play Store (Shweta Ganjoo/HT Tech)

TinyChef app on Google Play Store (Shweta Ganjoo/HT Tech)

And so, to complete the experience and provide users a complete culinary solution, TinyChef acquired Android OS-based Zelish app in August 2021. At the time, the Zelish app had over 125,000 users and it was helping users plan meals, shop for groceries and recommend recipes. Now combined together, TinyChef and the Zelish app provide an end-to-end culinary experience to the users.

The TinyChef experience

And unlike before, this culinary experience isn't restricted to smart displays for one and the app for the other. Instead, now it provides flexibility in usage and diversity in dishes to users, all while hand-holding them as they cook meal after meal every day.

The TinyChef experience now begins with the TinyChef app that can easily be downloaded from the Google Play Store. An iOS version of this app is under development. Once you install the app, it asks you two very important questions -- your dietary preferences and cuisines of your choice. Once you do that, you are directed to the homepage of the app where you can look for the recipe of a dish of your choice or you pick one from TinyChef's vast library of over 20,000 recipes, which includes various Maggi recipes for students (Chicken Maggi Noodles...Maggi Biryani...Paneer Taka-Tak Maggi...yumm!) to Vegan recipes (Coconut rice...Vegan Corn Fritters...Laksa Soup...Poutine) to Italian and Continental delights among others.

Up top is the Filter option, wherein you can narrow down your recipe search based on a variety of factors including time of cooking, type of dish (brunch, appetizer, etc) and cuisine. You can select from a total of 19 cuisines including Turkish, Lebanese, French, Thai, and Japanese.

But like we mentioned before, looking for recipes is not all that you can do with this platform. At the bottom, right next to the Home tab is the Menu Plan tab. This tab lets you plan your menu for up to an entire week. All you have to do is give it a list of the ingredients that you want to avoid, the number of days you want to plan the meal for (min:1 and max:7), the number of people at your home, which meals you want to cook and the list of ingredients available in your pantry. Using all this information and your pre-selected preferences, it will give you a meal plan for an entire week. An interesting bit here: If you don't like or if you don't want to eat a certain dish, you can replace it. And if you recently went grocery shopping, you can add all those items to the list of your available items simply by scanning the bill in the app.

And if you don't have a particular item that you need, you can purchase it using the Shopping tab within the app. The process is really simple. All you need to do is tap on the Add Ingredient button, which will then take you to a search bar where you can look for the items that you need and add them to the basket. Once you do that, you will be asked to enter your PIN-code and look for a vendor near your location, from where you will be able to make your purchases.

TinyChef app on Google Play Store. (Shweta Ganjoo/ HT Tech)

TinyChef app on Google Play Store. (Shweta Ganjoo/ HT Tech)

Hold on, there's more. The app has a Favorites tab that has all the recipes that you have liked and the recipes that you have contributed to the platform. In case you aren't sure, you can be a chef with Tiny Chef!

The things that matter

There are a couple of things that make TinyChef stand out among other food apps online. First is its easy-to-use interface. TinyChef's user interface is clean and easy to use. The app not only makes the journey of discovering new recipes and making them easier but it also makes it easy for users to add them to their existing meal plans using a click of a button -- just that.

Another aspect of the app is the AI that lets users cook various dishes as their smart speakers are showing it on screen. While users can enable the TinyChef skill on their smart displays, they can also click on the Send button inside a recipe to view it on an Alexa or Google Assistant-powered smart speaker or smart display.

The future

At the moment, TinyChef's vendor network is present in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. In the coming months, the company plans to expand its presence to 8-10 cities across the country including Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune among others.

Apart from this, TinyChef is currently available in Hindi, English and Hinglish. In the coming month, the company plans to add support for French to its platform.