So Much Potential – SuperCook Recipe By Ingredient Review

This app has so much potential that feels wasted. The idea is brilliant! List your ingredients and be able to cook with what you have. Perfect. But it has issues: 1. The ingredient lists are limited. E.g. “pasta” is one item and will bring up recipes with all sorts of different pastas, most of which I may not have on hand. 2. Diets are hard to work with. Just because you select “vegan” or “vegetarian” does not stop the app from pushing steak rubs and taco seasonings into the search results. If the app is going to give the option for diets, it should use a deep search function to filter the items out which would be of no use to that diet. 3. Misleading recipe titles. If I want to make a steak, having the previously mentioned steak rub show up as “Marinated Strip Steaks” and not include any steak in the recipe is not helpful. Maybe this is not SuperCook’s issue, but if that is the case, some curation of the recipes included on the app could be helpful. 4. Feedback options are too limited. If #2 or #3 are hard to do, which I understand they could be, then the feedback options should be expanded to let the users help curate useful search results themselves, by telling the system that the steak rub does not belong under vegan foods. This would ideally adjust search results for all users if the feedback is found to be reasonable. 5. Favorites cannot be removed. I went to the favorites tab to see what it would look like, and there were already 40 favorites, which I had not chosen, selected for me. I tried to unselect them to clear off the ones I wasn’t interested in, but there was not refresh button or save button and they would repopulate as my favorites. This is especially frustrating due to many of them being foods I cannot eat. 5. The Profile section/system needs help. I initially created an account and added all my ingredients. I then tried to login to my account via the website and was told my email address, which I had already entered, was not in the system. To test this theory, I logged out of SuperCook on my phone and tried to log back in. Sure enough, it had erased all my data and had me sign up again. At which point, I had to go back and enter all the ingredients again. Very frustrating. This app is a great idea. And I really hope to see if grow and flourish into a robust system for many different types of people to use. For people who are eating more “typical” diets on a consistent basis, it probably works great. But for those of us who need more creativity in our menu choices due to seasonal or allergic limitations, it is severely wanting at present.
Review by BethN3 on SuperCook Recipe By Ingredient.