Brief - The Hustle

This AI chef is designing recipes based on your leftovers

Written by Michael Waters | Sep 9, 2020 8:04:15 AM

The worst part of cooking isn’t the cleanup. It’s figuring out what the hell you’re going to do with that tin of pumpkin-pie spice you bought on a whim 3 years ago.

Enter Plant Jammer, a Denmark-based AI-powered app that dishes out recipes based on what you have lying around your kitchen.

Over 10k European households use it — and this spring, as lockdown lulled us all into a cooking-induced madness, downloads jumped 3x.

Plant Jammer started as a basic web-scraping tool

In an earlier version of the app, you’d enter the ingredients/spices you had on hand, and the AI tool would comb through existing recipes to find options.

Fresh off a €4m (~$4.7m USD) funding round, the app is now using AI to  whip up its own recipes from scratch.

Cherry tomatoes, leeks, and cinnamon might not seem like they go together — but the bot may be able to work something out.

There are just a few downsides

When a BBC reporter tried a Plant Jammer original recipe, her sweet-potato patties came out overcooked — and with a strong, er… oat flavor?

But Plant Jammer is ready to learn from mistakes like these.

After she finished cooking, the app asked her to submit feedback. An hour later, the instructions changed.