Watches are becoming smarter. In our mission to allow users to access food data anywhere anytime, we have built a tiny watchapp for the pebble smartwatch. The app gives you access to nutritional data of ingredients and even lets you convert measurements. Since everything is voice activated there is no cumbersome typing involved. Perfect for when your hands are covered in flour, but you need to know one more thing before you can finish your masterpiece. The app is currently super simple. Just press one button to activate voice recognition. Ask your question like "vitamin c in one apple", "how many calories are in 4 ounces of milk", or even "3 ounces of butter in grams". Once the question is understood, the app will show you the answer on t... (read more)

Evernote ceased support for their food app in 2015. They encouraged users to move their recipes and other content over to the original Evernote or to another app. Many people weren't happy to abandon a designated food app and still aren't happy with the food apps they know. If this sounds like you, please try spoonacular. Users who used the app to organize recipes or to track their best (and worst) meals at home or out will find us to be a good replacement for Evernote Food. How spoonacular Helps Evernoters With our website and apps we make it possible to: Find new recipes Our semantic recipe search engine makes it possible to find recipes with or without certain ingredients (e.g. brownies with walnuts or chili without beans), recipes ... (read more)

If you noticed we've been a bit silent for awhile, it's because we've been busy getting ready for Techweek Chicago and its LAUNCH competition. On June 26, spoonacular and 15 other startups participated in the semi-finals, having been selected from more than 100 companies who showcased their businesses the day before. The winning startup, Apollo Medical Devices, more than deserved first place with its potentially life-saving medical device. Before the semifinals, we spent two days at our table, drawing in visitors with our bright green shirts and inviting gummy bears. Those who participated in our little taste experiment—trying to distinguish the regular gummy bears from the sugar free gummy bears—were introduced to our site and apps. ... (read more)

We've been at the Web Summit in Dublin last week and had a look at about 2,000 startups from all around the world. Many of them were related to food, cooking, and health so we thought we would give you a quick summary of what's happening on the global stage of food startups.Every Cook Every Cook (from Zurich, Switzerland): Let IT cook for you - this kitchen device is meant to cook your meals for you; you just add the ingredients and it does the rest. When we spoke to the team at the Web Summit in Dublin, they said the machine currently works with 30 recipes from their own DigiMeals database. Though the concept is cool and the device looks great, this isn't really a "set it and forget it" solution - for many recipes you still h... (read more)

Have you ever tried searching for something simple like "sugar free muffins" only to get a laughable result like "sugar-coated muffins" on the first page of results? Maybe you searched for "gluten free pancakes" and got recipes with wheat flour or "healthy cheesecake" and felt like you gained a pound just looking at the decadent results? Unfortunately, some recipe search engines rely so heavily on your search terms that they won't find recipes that don't have the exact words in the title. So when you search for "burrito no beans" they assume you'd be interested in "three bean burrito" because, after all, your search included the word beans! Why Recipe Search Engines Fail This is definitely a rooki... (read more)

spoonacular is a new recipe search engine and social cooking platform. We started spoonacular because we are convinced we can create the world's best recipe search engine. Natural language search -- that is, search that understands the language people really use -- was a common theme in the PhD research of some of our team members. Others are foodies and amateur cooks intimately familiar with the many websites currently offering recipe search. Together, we intend to make spoonacular a recipe-finding and recipe-sharing platform unlike any other. Before the first version of spoonacular could go online, we knew we needed a memorable logo and decided to try 99designs. The first step, filling out the design brief... (read more)