meal share

[MareoRaft]

mealshare or meal share is an app to coordinate sharing meals.

pitch

It takes notable effort to cook a meal (time to cook, but also things like planning, inventory, and grocery shopping) but it takes marginally more effort to cook a larger version of the same meal. Therefore it is more efficient to cook in large portions, but leftovers only stay good for so long and you can only eat the same meal so many times in a row before you become sick of it.

Therefore a large household is great because one person can cook for many people. The person who cooks can rotate, and each person living there gets a different meal every day.

But what if you don't live in a large household or the people you live with don't want to coordinate with you? What then?

Enter mealshare, the meal coordination app that saves you and your friends time in a rewarding experience. Cooking is healthy, let's do it better and share the experience!

Framework

User Organization

• User: A single user/household contributing and receiving meals
• Group: A collection of users who exchange meals
• Networks: An area or region in which users can form groups

Meal Information (some may be optional)

• Meal: A meal a user can contribute/share
• Portion (or ration): An individual unit/quantity of a meal that can feed one adult for breakfast, lunch, or dinner
• Ingredients: Key ingredients of the meal
• Tags: Dietary or other relevant information for a meal
• Nutrition: Calories and macronutrient information
• Cost/Value: Specific or general descriptor of single portion of meal

Meal Exchange

• Cook: A user who cooks a meal
• Mealshare: The entire transaction by which a cook shares portions of a meal and others receive them
• Cook: The user sharing in a mealshare
• Guest: A user receiving any portions of a mealshare
• Portion Request: A request by a user to receive portions of a mealshare
• Dibs: A portion request that has not yet been confirmed by the receiver
• Guest Preferences: A set of options governing whether a portion request will be automatically submitted. And other preferences around how many portions, dietary restrictions, etc.
• Share Preferences: A set of options governing whether portion requests will be automatically selected

how it works

1. Cook announces mealshare (a meal they are going to make) (info might include meal name, ingredients, link, picture, maximum num portions they can make, min num portions, date and time of meal, date and time of confirmation, whether they will deliver)
2. Friends in the group can claim/bid portions (dibs), first come first serve (or determined by algo)
3. Cook confirms (can modify how many meals they give out to each person if needed) and everything gets locked in.
4. Everyone can see the info
5. Users can confirm portions actually got delivered (it can auto-confirm in 2 days)
6. Person's net portion count goes up by num portions they cooked for others (and/or net money goes up by value of portions cooked)
7. Each friend's net portion count goes down by num meals they received (and/or ditto)

features

no mooching policy

No mooching policy is a set of rules around how many times somebody can have a meal compared to how many times they cook a meal. A mooch is a person who eats other people's meals but never cooks for others.

maximum start negative portions: how far negative the num net portions can go at beginning of joining the group maximum mooch rate: the minimum ratio of positive portions to negative portions they can have

Pitfalls

• Mooching (see no mooching policy)
• Low rated meals
  • Not all meals or cooks will be enjoyed the same. There should be a system to avoid resentment over low quality meals
  • maybe they can get some level of reimbursement
  • maybe cooks get feedback on which of their meals are the most liked
  • we might identify "picky eaters"

groceries / recipes

mealshare could be an extension of groceries or vice-versa. Somebody proposing a meal can click the meal from groceries. So it will automatically populate the meal name, the ingredients, and potentially the notes.

calendar

mealshare can export/create events for people's calendars, such as

• confirmation event (last chance for users to modify dibs) (typically before the cook goes to the grocery store)
  • grocery shopping event (event for cook. if using groceries this could include or be linked a grocery list)
• cooking event (event for the cook for cooking the meal itself)
• food event (eating/retrieval itself, including whether they need to deliver / pick up, the location)

layout

• propose a meal button
• notifications to other when meal is proposed, and for other things
• friends see meal and maximum portions they can bid for
• friend inputs number
• export to calendar button
• list of upcoming meal events
• list of proposed meals
• little stats page (num meals made, num meals received, net meal count, mooch rate)
• feedback mechanism: users can send thanks (like likes i guess) to other users for a meal

[MareoRaft]

So now we need to add all the idea we discussed over the phone...

[abrobbins90]

I added some pitfalls and I added a framework to get some terminology in there. Feel free to change any of that, I just put stuff for placeholders. I'm not attached to any of the names.

[MareoRaft]

We need to think more about delivery / pick-up. How to facilitate that more so it's convenient and also how to fit it into price structure.

Also, as andrew said,

and we haven't even gotten into tupperware yet

[MareoRaft]

dish

[MareoRaft]

meal prep Mondays and millennials

[MareoRaft]

Rutgers mobile development club https://linktr.ee/rumad

[MareoRaft]

yummly app does some things: https://www.yummly.com/recipe/Mediterranean-Pasta-Salad-474553?prm-v1

[MareoRaft]

I think "chef" is better than cook, as it has a better connotation and is an international word