Cook It

Cookit is a demo app can find the perfect recipe for all based on a specific time limit and the ingredients given. The app guides the user through the selection process of finding the recipe and narrows down the options making it easy to choose. Featuring personal recipe galleries, popular recipes and a local database, Cookit is a social enterprise that donates to the Kanata Food Cupboard. It helps solve the problems of food wastage and starvation, as it makes use of every ingredient that is inputted. Especially with the current COVID-19 pandemic, this app can be greatly useful when grocery stores are running out of stock. Cookit is made to help contribute to the wellness of others to lead a healthy lifestyle. This would also help sustainability by reducing the food waste by the common person and learning how to make best use of available resources.

Busy people often skip meals due to inexperience in cooking, academic stress, and time constraints. The resulting health issue leads to malnutrition and overall lower academic performance. To promote healthy living in a modern way to these students, we have developed the innovative Cookit app, available on both Android and Apple mobile devices. With an intuitive and user-friendly interface, Cookit is ideally suited for users who struggle to make meals due to insufficient time and not knowing what to do with the ingredients on hand. The app takes input from users of the time that they have and the ingredients available to dynamically generate recipes that suit that situation. . By prompting the users to cook the food they have, not only will the app help people live healthier lives, but it also helps to reduce food wastage, thereby alleviating another serious global issue. Cookit will have different additional features that will help users have an easier and better experience cooking the meals. As a social enterprise, a portion of the profit generated by user purchases in the app will be donated to local food charities to further support our healthy eating cause.

The Cookit app is a modern substitute for the traditional method to get cooking ideas. With a few clicks on a user’s mobile device, the user can input the ingredients, time constraint, and dietary preferences. The user can use the app to view the recipe in the free demo version of the app.  Our Cookit app allows the user to input their time constraint from the start; thus, our app best serves our target market of busy users. In addition, other food app competitors make a personal database of the user’s preferences and keep other personal information. Such respect for privacy resonates with our tech-savvy users and fosters trust the paid features allow users to fully integrate their preferences into the meal. Currently, we have completed a prototype app on Thunkable, which demonstrates the overall concept of the app. The prototype provides a small sample of recipes for a limited number of dietary preferences. As the app and our business matures, paid features will further enhance user experience as they now can access the food needed to make the recipes much easier and with more efficiency.

We has seen and felt the effects of skipping meals, especially in local high schools. Once students begin to skip meals, it almost always leads to a never-ending cycle of repetition and ends up becoming a habit. Not only does the student feel fatigued, but they are unknowingly limiting themselves from their potential. We strives to break this cycle and help students re-enter a better lifestyle. Our motto is “nourishing the body is the key to health and happiness.” In particular, we target busy high school and university students who are vulnerable to poor nutrition. By providing a simple-to-use App targeted towards this tech-savvy population, we enable these students to cook nutritious meals given whatever ingredients and time constraints they have.This is an unmet opportunity as a significant number of students believe that a recipe app would be useful in their lives. We reached out to a local sample of 26 highschool students. This data comes from a global problem due to many individuals skipping meals. Cookit is made specifically to address this problem, and as a result, will also address food wastage and malnutrition. 

Our app, Cookit, is an app designed for students or people who work long hours who usually resort to getting an unhealthy meal at a fast-food restaurant due to their busy schedules. Cookit is designed for this specific demography to help them make better and healthier choices with their meals.  This app will provide alternate solutions to the modern fast food consumption to not only support farmers, but lead a sustainable lifestyle by supporting local farmers.

There are no fancy chef terms or anything catered towards professionals, which makes it usable for all types of audiences with different culinary experiences. It’s a handy tool that all people need in their kitchens.Some key competitors are Yummly and Pepper Plate. These companies are mostly targeted at older audiences that are interested in improving health and sticking to diets. They will offer deconstructed versions of food by carbs, vitamins, nutrients, and other groups. The main key component of these different competitors is aesthetic. These competitors, however, also share another key feature to attract different users. Each competitor uses its different visual elements and creative colour schemes to make it stand out. In response to this, Cookit will be altered to have a local database for user accounts, provide similar features to aid the user and make the app free. This way, anyone can access the app without financial restrictions.

The core technology is the app which is free for all to use. It's made using an existing program software named Thunkable. The app has been made like this as a prototype to test out the concept. The user input basic information to like their ingredients and time constraints and the program outputs a recipe to make. This recipe will have majority of the ingredients to help make the best of the food available. Later, with more advanced features developed, there will be maps to point out local famer's markets and charities. This will help farmers make more money for their products and continue good agricultural practices. It can be used by anyone as it is made for all despite any culinary experience. The goal is to reduce malnutrition and food wastage.

Since this is a prototype, there is no major testing done by others of this app. However in the pitch video, there is an app demo of how it works. Please skip to the time stamp 1:44.

Here is the link: https://youtu.be/qW7BLnwav0U

Team CinnaBunny has come together to establish a social enterprise BigBite Inc. Our team comprises five high school students in Ottawa who are united by their passion for promoting healthy eating and living. Our roles in the company are as follows:

• Saan John (CEO) leads the company in direction setting and all aspects of corporate functions.

• Shirley Nguyen (CTO) leads app development and maintenance.

• Amna Shahbaz (CFO) manages accounting and financing.

• Dania Zannerni (CMO) leads marketing campaigns and external messaging.

• Aleesha Katary (COO) manages day-to-day corporate operations.

For the further information about our business model and plans, please read our business plan to answer all the questions in this section:

https://docs.google.com/docume...