Were Aristotle alive today, he might be a fan of
RecipeMatcher. His philosophy – that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – is very true when you think about the making of a sand castle with millions of single grains of sand, or sounding a beautiful harmony by combining different voices. In like vein, RecipeMatcher, whose founders likely didn’t delve into the philosophical significance of their endeavor, is an online service that enables users to make a whole lot more, with less.
The idea of RecipeMatcher is as useful as it is simple. Whereas the
typical recipe Web site allows you to search for recipes that you already know of,
RecipeMatcher exposes you to new recipes in the most logical way. It allows you to consider what “tools” you have to work with.
This is how the service works:
A user creates a personalized account with RecipeMatcher. Through this account,
the user edits his or her ePantry.
The ePantry is simply a list of the
ingredients in the user’s real pantry at home. The user goes through a large
list of possible ingredients to be found in his pantry, and selects the
ingredients he wants to add to his ePantry.
Once he has specified the
ingredients he has to work with, the user can search for recipes on the basis
of those ingredients. This is personalized search specifically considering the
user’s available ingredients! The search results gives you information on what
percent of ingredients necessary are in the ePantry, what other key ingredients
are needed, and all the standard recipe information. Additionally, if there is
an item in the pantry that the user knows he will never buy, he can remove it
from the option list all together.
The personalized results for the search provide the user
with relevant recipes and new recipes. People often buy the same ingredients
and mundanely prepare the same dishes while they could easily be preparing new
and interesting dishes from the same ingredients. And if the user does find a
particularly exciting dish, there is a ‘favorite recipes’ option which stores
recipes to the user’s private profile.
Although RecipeMatcher offers the less-conventional
personalized search option, it also provides the traditional search options. A
user can search either through keywords in the recipe or by category. These
results, however, still take into consideration the contents of the pantry by
informing the user what ingredients are missing for preparing the dish.
Overall, the idea behind RecipeMatcher seems useful and
convenient. The personalization experience follows the successful movement of
individual consumer to producer interactions.
Given some time for growth in its
user base, the user-friendly and simple layout of RecipeMatcher seems to have
the right mix of ingredients to satisfy a variety of eaters, from college
students to Greek philosophers.
