The Apps Behind Great Food

Great food isn't just about what ends up on the plate. It's the cookbook you actually use, the restaurant you almost missed, the coffee you finally got right, and the habits that quietly hold it all together. Somewhere between curiosity and discipline, these six apps have shaped how I cook, eat, and think about food. These are the apps behind great food that I come back to.

Mela

I've loved cooking ever since I was a child. I always relied on cookbooks to learn more and more recipes. When I got older I was always looking for new tasty things to cook.

Mela helped me build my own cookbook from recipes I've collected across the internet, and it continues to help me every time I cook. One of my favourite features is its built-in browser. Whenever I stumble across a recipe online, Mela recognises it instantly and adds it to my cookbook with almost no effort. While cooking, I can adjust servings on the fly and start a step-by-step cooking mode with an always-on display, so I don't have to unlock my phone with messy hands. Mela’s awesome UI & UX makes collecting and cooking recipes for hobby chefs easy.

Guide MICHELIN

Having dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant is always a memorable experience. I've been lucky enough to visit a few over the past couple of years, and when you’re a fan of awesome food, this is definitely a bucket list item.

The Guide MICHELIN lists some of the world's best restaurants. Their beautifully designed app allows you to save your favourite restaurants and discover some of the best of haute cuisine. It's especially useful when trying to find something exquisite while travelling. Restaurants that haven't received a star but are still recommended by the Guide MICHELIN are also listed.

TooGoodToGo

Restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets sadly have to throw away food quite often, even though it is still very fresh. Meeting health & hygiene requirements is important for this industry, but throwing away perfectly good food still feels wasteful. At the same time, eating out several times a week can become expensive.

TooGoodToGo fixes this issue by giving businesses the option to sell food that would’ve been thrown away anyway on the same day to customers for a lower price point.

Via the app customers can enable reminders, notifications and set preferences for specific times of the day, when they want to be informed about offers by local businesses. Some businesses even offer delivery for a small additional fee. The great user interface helps to find everything you need easily. TooGoodToGo combines a great user experience with a wonderful mission of less food waste.

Coffee Book

Coffee isn’t just a warm beverage, but also a social activity and when you get into the brewing aspect of it, also almost a science. When starting with coffee brewing, remembering correct ratios and recipes for all various coffee drinks you can think of, can be a bit of a hassle. Especially with granular or odd measurements it is hard to recall everything.

Coffee Book helps you to fix this issue, and even more. It lets you save your own coffee recipes, keep track of your bean stock, log your latest brews, and rate them based on their flavour profile. Coffee Book even allows you to add your own gear and customise everything until you’ve got everything set up until you love it. It genuinely helped me in my coffee journey and I still use it today.

Bring

Grocery shopping for a family gets surprisingly complicated. It's easy to buy something twice or forget what is already sitting in the fridge.

Bring fixed this problem for my family. Bring lets you create multiple shared shopping lists that update instantly across everyone's devices. We have one shopping list for the drug store, one for groceries, one for beverages and alcohol, and even one for IKEA trips.

They offer a huge range of items with custom icons, you can also add your own items you buy frequently, add additional information like brand, quantity or urgency. For us it has transformed how we shop groceries, since everything updates live and you get notified once someone updates the list. A tiny but awesome addition is also that Bring has weekly catalogues with sales for your favourite grocery store which you can directly add to your list by clicking on the item in the catalogue.

YAZIO

Losing weight is something many people struggle with, a good starting point for it is Yazio. I have tried many calorie tracking apps and even though I very much dislike subscriptions, it is the best and most innovative calorie-tracking app I've ever tried.

I found its AI suggestions surprisingly useful when trying to improve my eating habits. You can freely configure your goals and body measurements, while the app also suggests personalised targets based on what you're trying to achieve.

What I especially like about it is the seamless scanning of barcodes, an extensive database of foods and restaurant meals, and that you can also create your own items that you often cook yourself.

Conclusion

None of these apps make you a better cook or a healthier eater on their own. What they do is remove the friction, the forgotten recipe, the wasted leftovers, the untracked habit, so the parts you actually care about get more of your attention.

Good food rarely comes down to one decision. It's the sum of a dozen small ones, and hopefully one of these six apps can help you in making them easier.