The Plant Jammer app suggests recipes based on what you have in your fridge.

Hold it. Plant Jammer is not your usual, run-of-the-mill recipe app that churns out a recipe not much different from a physical cookbook. It’s a vegetarian cooking app that encourages people to cook at home using plant-based ingredients available in their fridge. It also helps to avoid food waste, and eat healthily. This “AI Chef” will serve as “the GPS for your kitchen.” (BBC News)

Plant Jammer is a much-awarded app, winning the IBM Watson AI Prize, Nordea’s AI start-up Battle prize, the Creative Business Cup, Green Entrepreneur of the Year by Veggie World.

It uses a combination of artificial intelligence, deep data, and food and flavor science to suggest instantly vegetarian (plant-based) recipes based on whatever is available. Users can dynamically add or substitute ingredients and customize the recipes depending on their priorities for taste, health, or sustainability.

Over 100K European households use the app. During the coronavirus pandemic, lockdown-forced home cooking led to a 3X jump in downloads of the app.

Plant Jammer raised €4 million in August from Danish investment firm Vækstfonden, Dr. Oetker, and Miele Ventures.

Help! Recipe required!

Here’s how it works.

• List the ingredients in your fridge
• The app will generate recommended recipes by identifying often-paired items – using AI to run through three million recipes
• Select a recipe and customize or improve it by balancing flavors such as Sour, Sweet, Umami, oil, salty, crunchy, bitter, and spicy
• Display cooking instructions

If the recipe is successful, you can save it in your personal cookbook.

Meanwhile, the app itself learns from this interaction with you and improves its database of recipes – a singularly different approach compared to traditional, static databases of recipes.

“We are actually constructing new recipes from scratch each time with an AI [artificial intelligence],” said Michael Haase, founder and CEO of Plant Jammer, to BBC News. “This is going to be the future.”

Related Story:   Impossible Foods Raises $200M; Vegan Pork On The Way