Our project is a recipe exchange forum site. It is meant to be used mainly by hobbyist chefs, baking enthusiasts, etc. We noticed while browsing recipe sites that they were mostly static sites. They had no real user interaction beyond rating / reviewing recipes and no sense of community. Additionally, none of them provided a way to personalize your feed so that you could make sure you were viewing recipes adjusted to your preferences. These preferences might include dietary preferences like being vegan, preferences for foods from certain cultures, allergies to some ingredients, and others. The main goals of this project are: To have that community of users interacting on the site, actively sharing recipes, commenting on others, and suggesting improvements to existing recipes. To more effectively organize recipes so users can easily search for and personalize their feed with recipes matching their preferences Another goal of the project is to enable the sharing of recipes from diverse cultures. This might involve, for example, translating the web page so it would be more accessible to people who do not speak English.
Though popular recipe sites like Allrecipes, BBC, Food Network, NYTimes do exist, they do not provide their user community with meaningful interactions. For example, the front page of BBC Good Food has a “This week we’re watching” section, but it’s unclear why or how those recipes in particular are trending. It appears that user feedback is not really taken into account in generating suggested content. Similarly, this website also has a “Most discussed” section, but upon examination, none of these recipes seem to have very much discussion. It’s possible they’re being shared on other websites, but our goal is to bring recipe sharing, finding, and discussion all into one place. Furthermore, we feel the 5-star review system employed by many of these sites is ineffective at summing up community opinion of recipes and stymies discussion between users. Additionally, while recipe sites tend to have a large quantity of recipes, users complain about their experience sifting through them. Many reviews of the very popular site Allrecipes complain of a lack of search result relevance, making it a difficult process finding the recipe one is looking for among many, many others. We aim to robustly organize recipes so that what a user wants, they can easily find.