Without a doubt, one of the best—and worst—trends to spawn from social media is food porn. There’s so much satisfaction in peeling through photos of short rib pasta (or a kale frittata, if that's more your speed) on Instagram, but those drool-worthy pics can be torture when you’re actually hungry. Enter: Tender, an app that allows you to source stunning images of dishes from kitchens around the world, and also get the recipes for your very own cooking pleasure.
Tender officially launched on the App Store and Google Play store June 13 and June 24, respectively. The interface is, as the name suggests, akin to Tinder in that you can swipe through thousands of recipes, swiping left to pass or right when a dish piques your interest and you want to save it to your digital cookbook. Tap the picture to see the ingredients, or other details about the dish. Then quickly search your cookbook by words or phrases or by using filters. Recipes can be filtered by type (drinks or desserts), main ingredient (like fish or chicken), or diet (vegan or vegetarian). Users can also save their favorite recipes to their digital collections.
All three core team members behind the app now reside in Boston, but met while freshman roommates at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Jordan Homan is a software developer at Boston-based EF Education, and both Necco Ceresani and Dave Blumenfeld work at the software startup XebiaLabs. Ceresani, fittingly, is a foodie who also has had extensive experience in the restaurant industry, working at a several top Charleston restaurants like Fig and Hall’s Chop House. So it’s no surprise that he’s the mastermind behind the initial idea for the app. Cooking, going out to eat and trying new cuisines was a key component of his friendship with Blumenfeld and Homan during their college years.
“We would often cook on Sundays and would have a particularly epic ‘Feaster’ meal every Easter Sunday,” Blumenfeld told BostInno in an email interview. “When Necco told Jordan and I about his idea, we were instantly on board.”
The recipes on Tender come from blogs all over the Internet, and they all take users directly to the original source to ensure that the author gets credit. Tender is open to including recipes from any food blogger, and the startup encourages anyone to fire out an email if there’s a dish they want listed.
The most surprising thing they’ve found so far? Tender seems to have broad appeal for a much older demographic than they originally expected.
Future features for better search
Right now, the team is writing code to scrape the data from most websites, but in the next few months they’ll be creating plugins for Wordpress and other platforms, which bloggers can then install to automatically syndicate their recipes into Tender as they publish them. Soon, Tender will also be listing nutritional information in recipe details, introducing a better way to filter for food allergies, and possibly more ways to share the recipes.
Tender can obviously serve as a great traffic driver for food and cooking blogs because users are directed to the original source when they want to view a full recipe. Additionally, any recipe that is shared through Tender to social networks leads directly back to the source. Going forward, Blumenthal says a top priority for the startup is to use its sharing mechanisms to create value for food bloggers. Another idea they’re considering is incorporating a filter that enables the user to input the ingredients they have in their fridge and find recipes that include only those items they have available.
“This could be interesting if all the user has is paprika, chocolate chips, and two potatoes,” said Blumenfeld. “But who knows? There may be a recipe out there.”
All images via Tender.
