Simple Chef
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Team
Madeline Mcmains, Reed O’Neil, Mariah Marshall, Emma Jones, Isaac Carcare, and Spencer Naugler
Problem
Figuring out how to plan can be extremely stressful and time-consuming, especially for individuals who have busy schedules. Cookers struggle with meal planning, costing them over $1,600 a year in wasted food and eating out. They also lose over 6 hours a month in time, which could be critical for a busy individual. After conducting interviews, we concluded that our customers are faced with three problems: there’s not enough time to plan, planning weekly meals and sticking to them is difficult, and using complex recipes is challenging.
Solution
SimpleChef is our solution, a website that allows customers to plan out their meals weekly, automatically generates a grocery list, create your own recipes, and find recipes that suit your diet restriction needs.
Market Size
Cooking meals at home has been increasing in popularity as people are working from home more. 29% of consumers in the U.S. plan their meals out for the entire week. Although, 42% of American consumers plan their meals out for the next few days, especially with kids involved. With these statistics, we want to market to families with children, as well as middle-aged adults. We want to get people moving, find healthier options and feel more comfortable going to the store, all in one application.
Competition
There’s lots of competition in the food recipe market. A lot of the applications are very simple with few features. They mainly focus on one thing or the other. There are apps that have been in the market for a while. Some of the applications connect with Walmart to help them shop for items.
Business Model
Our team wants to create meal ideas to help users feel less stressed with meal planning. It’d help plan healthier meal options, as well as let them find recipes based on food items they already have in their pantry.
Marketing and Sales
As of now, SimpleChef has used Facebook to advertise to certain demographics to get people to give feedback on our application. This was to get the brand name and logo out there, as well as get people’s interest in the app. We had over 246 emails provided to us. We are also planning on using Social Media Influencers to attract people, as well as using consumers that would be signed up to refer to other consumers about our app.
Progress to Date
Our SimpleChef team has done a lot of validation of our defined problem and solution. Through the use of interviews, surveys, and demonstrations, we’ve been able to validate that customers want to use our website. The team created a website through bubble.io as a minimal viable product that’s ready to be tested by real customers.
Future Milestones
In the future, SimpleChef would like to add pantry management to the website. Using artificial intelligence, customers would be able to scan items they have in their pantry, and then SimpleChef would generate recipes with those ingredients. Our team at SimpleChef also wishes for an advertisement campaign that suits our style and targets busy individuals who love to cook. We’ve also had survey results of a possible food social media networking system for people to get involved with.