Beyond Hello Fresh - Don't Think About the Groceries

Originally published as an X Article.

I recently started using Hello Fresh. It’s pretty decent. Every week, you receive groceries with recipes and the correct quantities to cook them. You can choose how many meals you want.

Everything has nutritional information, so it’s really easy to gauge how many calories I’ve been eating. I’ve been cutting (dieting) for the last two months.

Pros:

You always have something in the fridge.
The food has been better than expected.
You can track calories easily.
There’s really little food waste as it’s portioned.

Cons:

Hello Fresh meals are a bit strict. You have to book the week before, and sometimes you might forget, and it sends an automatic order.
Cooking the meals is sometimes excessive. They make you use a lot of pots and pans for no good reason. I prefer more of a 20/80 approach.
It’s not really cheap for how little food you get. It’s around $10 per meal, and you still have to cook it. On average, it takes over 30 minutes plus cleaning up a lot of stuff.

I’ve been looking to build my own self-made HelloFresh alternative.

Get delivery of portioned food items to cook tasty recipes.
Possibly new recipes that you might like.
Possibly recipes that require little work.
Get written recipes with calories, so I can track them.
Get them anytime you want, like same-day.

In general, I don’t want to think about groceries. I realized I like them to show up in the fridge. So my project started as ‘Don’t Think About the Groceries’ (DTAG).

The first step has been finding a way to get ingredients from a recipe (or multiple recipes) delivered within the day. That can be done using Instacart. There’s an Instacart plugin that allows you to order food from a recipe website.

It’s an official schema: https://schema.org/Recipe

Just need to make your site shoppable: https://instacart-tastemakers.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8801040243476-Make-your-site-shoppable.

This means adding an Instacart button that, I guess, will get info from the website itself and query Instacart with a shopping cart of those ingredients.

Exactly what I want!

There might be an easier way to get that API to work, but for now, I’m fine having an HTML page for the recipe, as it might even be the way I print and see the recipe. Also it seems i would get a 5% cut of how much money people will spend on Instacart as a cut? that would be decent enough for me.

So I made Claude follow the schema and create the HTML.

I also needed to host that HTML page somehow, and I picked: https://tiiny.host

Which allows you to host a single HTML page.

So here it is, a clunky pasta dish is served for you to buy on Instacart: https://pasta-with-tomato-sauce.tiiny.site

You can use it to order the correct ingredients on Instacart. Or almost the firs ingredient is borked.

This is kind of the first idea. just wanted to see how to bridge instacart.

automate the ordering part. like have a page where you chose the recipes.
Automated recipes store i guess? possibly crate them with some LLM help.

P.S.

Not used to write this kind of stuff, inspired by @levelsio to do stuff in the open.
Also it is so much little work that it is a bit shameful to post about it.
But it has been nice to write about it.
Will start writing some code in the medium term.
don’t really plan to build it for others but i kinda need it as i said i am mostly tired of hello fresh now.