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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Social Media

Pepper the App Aims to be the Instagram for Cooking

Jake Aronskind realized that every time he went on a social media platform, most of what he was seeing was food. After the pandemic began, this was amplified. Seeing people he never thought would be cooking and baking made him realize that there needed to be a more specialized platform for sharing food and recipes. This resulted in him and several cofounders developing the Pepper app.

Specialized social media platforms exist for activities like running (Strava), reading (Goodreads), and hiking (AllTrails). Still, most foodies share their culinary creations on the most popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, and Pinterest. I recently spoke with Aronskind prior to Pepper’s Labor Day weekend launch, and he said, “It’s this idea of building a platform for a specific niche in your life. At the end of the day, Instagram, Facebook, all these other platforms, are simply not made for niche activities.”

Pepper most closely follows the format of Instagram. The app features a newsfeed where you can see the posts from friends and the people you follow. Instead of just adding a caption to go along with a photo, the poster can add a full recipe or list of ingredients. Similar to hashtags, there are options to categorize the recipe with different tags, including different diets (i.e., vegan, keto, gluten-free), difficulty level, and meal type.

From the app’s explore page, trending recipes can be seen from other users. If you find a recipe you want to make on the explore page or newsfeed, you can click the “save” button on the photo. The “saved” section on your personal profile hosts these posts, acting almost like a digital cookbook.

Pepper the App Animation Video
Pepper’s how-to video

Social media is how many of us stayed connected with others during the pandemic, and in 2020, Americans spent an average of 82 minutes per day on social media platforms. Cooking and “stress-baking” became coping mechanisms for dealing with the negative psychological effects of the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that food posts have dominated social media platforms in the past year and a half.

Recon, a food social media app that launched at the beginning of summer (founded by former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff), connects users through photos of homemade dishes and restaurant reviews. Whisk, a recipe-sharing app, partnered with TikTok at the beginning of the year to trial run the integration of its recipe saving and grocery list features. Foodqu!rk is an online platform where users find their food personality and connect with others through dietary preferences.

The Pepper app launched this week, and it is available for free in the iOS App Store. It will likely be available for Android phones by the end of the month.

Can #RecipeForDisaster Help Us Stop Wasting So Much Food?

By this point, you’ve probably heard the (admittedly sobering) stats a few times over: according to the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted — almost half of all the fruits and vegetables we grow. At the same time, almost a billion people around the world go hungry. There are quite a few apps trying to reduce the amount of food waste, or redistribute excess food to those in need.

A new social media campaign from the World Food Programme (WFP) wants you to turn food waste from a recipe for disaster into a, well, #RecipeForDisaster. WFP hopes that this hashtag will spark a social media movement that will draw attention to food waste and highlight simple ways that people can reduce their wasted food at home. Here’s how it works:

#RecipeForDisaster: Join the Fight Against Food Waste

The campaign asks you to make a meal out of ingredients that will soon expire, then share photos (or videos) of the dish with the hashtag #RecipeForDisaster. (Be forewarned: A search for that hashtag on Instagram will turn up some odd images that are very much not food-related.) The video also suggests you make a donation to the WFP to help them reach their goal of eradicating world hunger by 2030.

An article in The Guardian argued that millennials’ obsession with Instagraming their food has heightened our expectations about what food should look like, prompting us to buy more than we need and reject perfectly edible food, just because it doesn’t look as nice as it used to. By promoting photos of dishes made with less-than-perfect-looking ingredients, the #RecipeForDisaster campaign hopes that they can fight this trend.

#RecipeforDisaster isn’t the first social campaign to draw awareness to food waste. Perhaps most prominent is Ugly Food & Veg, an Instagram account with over 40K followers that reposts photos of oddly-shaped produce. Imperfect Produce‘s Instagram account, which has with over 68K followers, also highlights nonconventional (“ugly”) fruits and vegetables, as well as ways to use up the entirety of your produce.

#RecipeforDisaster could go further than some of these other accounts by asking the consumer to contribute content. If they can gain enough traction (and in the unpredictable realm of social media, that’s a big “if”), they could go far in promoting awareness about a critical issue in our food system. They’re not off to a bad start: the hashtag currently features in 6,300 posts using the hashtag on Instagram and many more on Twitter, including posts from celebrity chef like José Andres. But in our age of constant stimulation, it’s hard to keep anyone’s attention for too long — even on issues as pressing as food waste.

So next time you have an extra brown banana in your fruit bowl, don’t throw it away — turn it into banana bread and post it to the gram with #RecipeforDisaster.

Knorr’s “Eat Your Feed” Delivers Instagram-Inspired Recipes… Sorta

Millennials everywhere can finally justify all those overhead photos they just had to snap (and then Instagram) before digging into their food.

Knorr, the powdered soup and seasoning brand owned by Unilever, has developed an AI-powered tool which scans your Instagram feed and then recommends recipes based on your photos. Dubbed Eat Your Feed, the tool uses visual recognition technology to match your food snaps with recipes from Knorr’s database. After you get your recommendations, you can save the recipes or add the ingredients to a digital shopping basket. And if you’re not already on the ‘gram, don’t worry — you can use this short quiz on Knorr’s website to get personalized recipes.

In the spirit of thorough journalism, I decided to give Eat Your Feed a try.

After entering in my Instagram login information, the webpage whirred around a bit before directing me to a page of almost completely nonsensical recipe matches.

First up was a photo I took of burgers & fries (it was actually the Impossible Burger, but I wouldn’t expect Eat Your Feed to know that). I would have expected it to match this to a perhaps another burger recipe, or even a grilling one, but instead I got… chicken and pasta soup?

As I scrolled through my recommendations, some of Eat Your Feed’s logic became clear. Some. For example, a photo I’d posted of some seaside cliffs linked to a recipe for Mussels Meuniere. However, most of the tool’s process was still shrouded in mystery: why did a painting of a cake equate to spinach soup? What linked a photo I took of a cave in Greece to a lemony pasta dish?

Presumably, it was some tag which I didn’t know existed — but Eat Your Feed did. When you allow the tool access to your Instagram, it also gains access to all of your data stored on the platform. It uses AI to scan your captions, locations, and tagged people to try to draw links to their recipe database. A few of these tags are displayed above your matches, which gives you a clue into how the algorithm made its selections. This explains why my photo of the ocean synched up to a mussels dish — both were tagged “Beach.” As to how they categorized both burgers and chicken & pasta soup as “Time” and “United States” is slightly less clear, however, though I suppose I was in America when I ate them?

Those who take the quiz instead of letting Instagram take the wheel have a bit more transparency into their recommendations. I took the 5-question quiz and was suggested recipes that were “Active” and “European” based on my answers. Which makes more sense than pairing cake and spinach soup together because both are purportedly “Swedish.”

One of the tool’s biggest issues lies with Knorr itself. All of the recipes must contain at least one of their ingredients, and since Knorr only makes soup stock cubes and powders, that limits the selection pretty severely.

I couldn’t find a way to save a recipe or add ingredients to an online shopping cart; the only option was to email myself a link to the recipe. In the future, it would be smart for Knorr to partner up with a shoppable recipes platform and a grocery delivery service like Allrecipes/AmazonFresh so they can actually deliver on those promises.

To give Eat Your Feed credit, the tool was gimmicky enough to suck me in in the first place. Plus, I did find myself clicking around other recipes on the site for a minute after I got my personalized meals. However, most of my suggested meals were so laughably off-base that I’m wouldn’t be inclined to make them at home, no matter how much they might remind me of that time I went to the beach two years ago.

So is the tool worth using? In short: no. It gives you almost no utility, but it’s still fun in the way that, say, taking on online quiz about Which Backstreet Boy Is Your Spirit Animal is fun: it’s pretty useless and probably inaccurate, but it’s a great way to waste a few minutes on the internet.

To promote Eat Your Feed, Knorr will open a pop-up restaurant at London’s Jones & Sons on April 11, where diners will be served meals matched to their Instagram feeds. I’ll be sad to miss my four-course meal of various soups and soup-like dishes, but maybe I’ll check in on the ‘gram. And then recreate them at all at home.