Recipe Rescue is a cooking assistant that connects the recipes you save with what is already in your kitchen, helping you work out what to cook and what you still need. Built by a six person team, we took it from initial framing to a clickable prototype.
Course: AI & Tech in Product + Service Strategy @ IE University
You arrive home at 10 p.m. after class on a Thursday, exhausted, and open the fridge to find two eggs, half a carton of milk, half a bottle of sundried tomatoes and leftovers from Monday.
Is it going to be one of the 1000+ recipes sitting in your Instagram saves that you found over the weekend and were absolutely going to make this week, because you’re on your health grind, in your budget conscious era and also trying not to contribute to food waste? Or is it an Uber Eats click because, you just need to be fed and make your 8am class tomorrow.
Some nights, it’s takeout. Other nights, it’s a slice of Gouda with a side of mental gymnastics.
And we wanted out of that loop.
We started with ourselves, but we didn’t want to design for six people in a classroom. Through interviews, user stories, self reflection and early sketches, we started mapping where the friction actually sat.
Recipes already live in lots of places, from social saves and websites to cookbooks and family recipes. Discovery wasn’t the problem. The mess started afterwards, when saved recipes, kitchen inventory and shopping lived in separate systems.
So we built Recipe Rescue around the missing connection between what people wanted to cook and what they could actually make.
People don't always approach cooking from the same place. So we designed two simple entry points: use what you already have, or cook from your saved recipes.
For the prototype, we focused on simple ways to import recipes, like a social media post or recipe website, while leaving room for broader sources later.
The inventory side came with its own friction: keeping it up to date. We didn’t want Recipe Rescue to depend on people manually logging every egg, onion and leftover, so we prototyped the fridge and pantry scanning as a lighter way to keep track of what was already there.
(Tiny shoutout to Indyx for inspiring how I thought about designing convenience into key features for habit building.)
Once Recipe Rescue understands what you want to make and what's already in your khchon, it can make shopping smarter too. Instead of a soporate list for every recipe, it consoldates ingredients that overlap.
Three recipes need cilantro? One bag. Not
You arrive home at 10 p.m. after class on a Thursday, exhausted, and open the fridge to find two eggs, half a carton of milk, half a bottle of sundried tomatoes and leftovers from Monday.
Is it going to be one of the 1000+ recipes sitting in your Instagram saves that you found over the weekend and were absolutely going to make this week, because you’re on your health grind, in your budget conscious era and also trying not to contribute to food waste?
Or is it an Uber Eats click because, you just need to be fed and make your 8am class tomorrow.
Some nights, it’s takeout. Other nights, it’s a slice of Gouda with a side of mental gymnastics. And we wanted out of that loop.
You arrive home at 10 p.m. after class on a Thursday, exhausted, and open the fridge to find two eggs, half a carton of milk, half a bottle of sundried tomatoes and leftovers from Monday.
Is it going to be one of the 1000+ recipes sitting in your Instagram saves that you found over the weekend and were absolutely going to make this week, because you’re on your health grind, in your budget conscious era and also trying not to contribute to food waste?
Or is it an Uber Eats click because, you just need to be fed and make your 8am class tomorrow.
Some nights, it’s takeout. Other nights, it’s a slice of Gouda with a side of mental gymnastics. And we wanted out of that loop.
Farah Abdou
Cindia Escalante Vinuesa
Bhavya Jagadesh
Mariana Porras Mena
Maryam Sánchez González
Ximena Thiermann
Figma / FigJam
ChatGPT
Stitch
Google AI Studio
People don't always approach cooking from the same place. So we designed two simple entry points: use what you already have, or cook from your saved recipes. Same great meals. different starting points.
For the prototype, we focused on simple recipe inputs like social posts and recipe websites, while leaving room for broader sources later.
The inventory side created another problem. If Recipe Rescue only worked when someone diligently logged every egg, onion and leftover, we would just be replacing one kind of admin with another.
So we explored scanning the fridge and pantry as a lighter way to capture what was already there.
You arrive home at 10 p.m. after class on a Thursday, exhausted, and open the fridge to find two eggs, half a carton of milk, half a bottle of sundried tomatoes and leftovers from Monday.
Is it going to be one of the 1000+ recipes sitting in your Instagram saves that you found over the weekend and were absolutely going to make this week, because you’re on your health grind, in your budget conscious era and also trying not to contribute to food waste?
Or is it an Uber Eats click because, you just need to be fed and make your 8am class tomorrow.
Some nights, it’s takeout. Other nights, it’s a slice of Gouda with a side of mental gymnastics. And we wanted out of that loop.