Imran M N
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ChefyChef: ranking recipes by what's about to go bad

TL;DR A meal planner that ranks recipes by what's closest to spoiling, with a private grocery list and one shared recipe catalog.

4 September 2026 · 1 min read

⇄ Paired with No. 009: ChefyChef - Smart Meal Planner

Most meal-planning apps start from what you feel like eating. ChefyChef starts from what's about to go bad. Log your groceries, and every recipe suggestion is ranked by how well it rescues the ingredients closest to spoiling, live at chefychef.imranmn.life.

WHAT'S DONE

Grocery items get a category (produce, dairy, meat, and so on) and an auto-estimated expiry date if you don't set one, from 2 days for seafood to 180 for pantry staples. The inventory view color-codes everything by urgency, and the recipe list re-ranks itself in real time as items get logged, used, or age closer to their expiry date, against a catalog of 79 recipes spanning American, Italian, Asian, regional Indian, Mediterranean, Mexican, Thai, and Middle Eastern cooking. The ranking itself matches ingredients to what's in your kitchen (exact match first, fuzzy match second), weights by how urgently each one needs using, and penalizes whatever the recipe is still missing.

THE PART THAT MATTERS

The tricky design call wasn't the ranking math, it was the data model: your grocery list needs to stay private to you, but the recipe catalog is more useful shared and improved for everyone. ChefyChef splits it exactly that way: groceries live behind a private, per-visitor session, while all 79 recipes are one shared, read-only catalog every visitor draws from.

WHAT'S NEXT

A shopping-list export for whatever a chosen recipe is still missing, so the app closes the loop from "what should I cook" to "what do I need to buy."

Imran M N is a product & strategy consultant (PwC, ex-Deloitte, IIM-B), working across cloud economics, product discovery, and applied AI. Get in touch →

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