I'm a carer who built a free food-waste app — would you tell me what it's missing?

[MotherCupboardMichael]

Hello Mumsnet — posting via the Non-member requests board, fee paid!
I'm a carer from south-west London. Between looking after my partner and running a household, keeping on top of what food was in the cupboards was one job too many — I got fed up with binning things I'd forgotten were there. So I built an app called Mother Cupboard. It keeps track of what's in your cupboards, fridge and freezer (you can add things by barcode, receipt/cupboard photo, or voice), shows you what's going out of date, and keeps your shopping list.

To be completely upfront about the money side: the tracking, shopping list and date badges are free forever. There's an optional Premium tier (£3.99 a month) for the extras — meal ideas based on what you've already got in, expiry reminder notifications, and setting up sharing with the rest of your household. Everyone gets the full app free for the first month when they sign up, no card details needed.

I'm not here to sell it to you — I'd like your honest opinions, because busy households are exactly who it's for and I'd rather hear the unvarnished truth now than build the wrong things:

1. How do you currently keep on top of what food you have in — and what's the most annoying part?
2. If you tried an app like this, what would make you delete it within a week?
3. What one feature would make it worth keeping?

If you'd like to have a poke around before answering, it's on both stores — but comments from people who'd never use such an app are just as useful:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/mother-cupboard/id6762460788
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mothercupboard.app

(A note for anyone outside the UK: it's only fully launched in the UK at the moment — Ireland, Australia and New Zealand are coming shortly.)

I'll be reading and replying to everything. Thank you — and be as brutal as you like, I'd rather know now.

I love the idea that takes food off the list for you. But most recipes I use are my own. Can I add those in somehow?

It only takes food off the list from the recipes generated in the app. The vast majority of updating the app is manual, and would be hugely time consuming. Much more so than just checking the fridge before doing your meal plan or shop,

That is not something I'd thought of. I would have thought it is something which could be incorporated like the taking a photo of a receipt. how are your recipes stored?

In my head mostly. An option to add recipes would be useful and then in the app I could say ‘I’ve just cooked x’ and it would remove that from my virtual food store.

I think your pitch for this might be wrong. I’m not sure it’s a huge time saver. But it is a waste/money saver. As a mum of two I often find that there’s stuff I forgot I had and it goes in the bin. If I had an app that said your lunch/ dinners this week are x. And then generated a weekly meal plan based on expiry dates for example, that would be really helpful. It would save me money on waste and also time on running to the shops to get last minute extras.

there is an effort of updating the app, if the outputs were good though I wouldn’t mind doing it. But not everyone has that time, or inclination. I think your target audience might be the uber organised types. A slight paradox given it an organisation tool, but the long term users will be those prepared and organised enough to update the app.

There's many, many meal planning apps that already exist that give you the functionality you want, and also include the ability to prefill your online shopping basket with the big stores, plus have links to huge recipe sites and guest chef recipes rather than AI guff, plus nutitional information etc. Cherrypick is my preferred one, but there's many others out there.

OP most of your replies are being written by ChatGPT. You sound so fake, sorry!!

Hey, I'm sorry you think that. I guess it's hard to tell. But I am a real person who came up with an idea through having to care for my girlfriend. Not sure what else I can do.

Well you must be a real person of some sort to be able to post. Unless you are another bit of unauthorised bot action by Open AI (in the media this morning for their AI making an unauthorised attack on another AI).
But assuming you are a real person, your posts are being written by ChatGPT, right?
You did the right thing by (a) doing your market research (eg asking here) and (b) paying the fee to receive MNs unvarnished views.

Good luck with your business.

Hey, yeah it's definitely me and this has been well worth it. I greatly appreciate all the feedback. You can get into an positive echo chamber when with your friends and family. I even got interest from the national media from this post :-D

I would not use this. The hassle of having to enter all the items is way too much admin and far more work than just keeping an eye on it manually.

I also dont like the name, it's misogynistic - sorry! Its not only mothers who should be in charge of cooking and shopping and it just irritates me that it utilises that stereotype.

Well the app is free for a month when you sign up. Give it a whirl, I'd love to know what you think. As for the recipes, it is aimed at people who may be at a loss for what to cook, as I was. But I will keep in mind your idea.

Just a quick update and message of thanks to all those who've responded to my post. I've now added all the supermarket weekly special offers (except Waitrose & Lidl who don't do that sort of thing) to the app. So Nectar, Clubcard prices, special offers at Asda & Morrisons. Your feedback was part of this, so thank you again.

Have you partnered with the various supermarkets so that you can now meal plan and shop online from the app?

At a similar price point as you are suggesting for your app, there are apps like Cherrypick which are well established, offer everything your app offers (but tried and tested and slick) and also allows you to fully meal plan from recipes from big names, allows you to update your own recipes and shop online from a variety of supermarkets at no extra cost. It can display the supermarket's full stock plus any offers applicable. Cherrypick certainly also has the "food waste" element, allowing you to snap your fridge, plus analyses your previous purchases and suggests recipes based on what you are likely to have left over and also a search by ingredient facility to search recipes for your fridge contents.

I can't see how your app can compete with apps like this, especially at the price point you're suggesting.

I think the meal planning/food management app sector is saturated, you're too late to the game and your offering is far too basic to be saleable. Even the free version of Cherrypick offers more than your premium paid for offering.

Please stop wasting your time, and go back to the drawing board. Marketing your product in it's current state is not going to serve you well, as it's not a competitive offering. It needs a lot more features and a lot more development to be a product that has half a chance of success and to be able to compete against the many, many superior apps on the market in this area.

Perhaps there's a gap in the market for "budget" meal planning and looking at shopping lists with Lidl/Aldi - that's not something I've much seen in the field. Would also link into the "food waste" side of it, as saving food waste saves money. Most meal planning apps don't have Aldi/Lidl well represented. But arguably the tight budget Aldi/Lidl shoppers won't want to pay for an app? It would have to be competitively priced and genuinely save people money.

the app actually came from exactly that place: opening a fullish cupboard and still thinking there's nothing in. So you've landed on where this is coming from. Budget shoppers wasting less is the whole point. I've done minimal marketing to push this so far, but I have an interview with a national newspaper later today, so as much free or low-cost marketing as possible will give me a feel for how this may work. It's in NZ, Aus and Ireland now too, all for no further costs. Crazy what you can do from home nowadays.

Sigh. But your app doesn't currently really offer anything that isn't already offered, far, far better by other apps at a similar or lower price point, or indeed, for free via AI.

My point is that you need to go back to the drawing board and refine/redesign your app so it has either a USP not already better done by others, or massively (and I do really mean massively) improve your app, so it's in the same league as other similar offerings.

At the moment your app doesn't offer anything new, innovative or even a good version of a commonly produced product.

All the feedback here is that it's not fit for purpose, which you keep ignoring and you keep answering as if people are telling you its great.

If you launch it in it's current state, it will flop. If you can find and develop some way to make it unique and functional (and fully embracing budget shopping, including crucially pairing with Lidl/Aldi strikes me as a good USP to build upon due to COL). But you need to develop that first before launch. If you launch a dud app (such as it is in it's current state) then people will always associate your name and brand with the substandard product that you're currently offering.

I don't rate the name, either. It limits your market not just to women but to mothers, presumably those in the "feeding a family" state of life. I do have children but they are adults, and the name is putting even me off. Why would you want to deter all male or childless female potential customers?