RecipeRadar - search recipes by ingredients (2024)

RecipeRadar helps you to search for recipes by ingredients, plan your meals, and create food shopping lists.

The service aims to be distraction-free, privacy-respecting, and is provided as free and open source software so that you can inspect and modify the code - feedback and contributions are welcome.

We'd like to help you to:

• Plan, cook and share meals;
• Discover healthy and economical eating habits;
• Reduce food wastage;
• Improve food safety and hygiene.

We are registered as a Community Interest Company in the United Kingdom and our goals are legally aligned with community benefit rather than to maximize shareholder profit.

In order to provide the greatest possible value to the community and respect user values, the application is developed under the following leading principles:

• The app should provide the simplest and most distraction-free recipe planning and preparation assistance possible;
• The app should support internationalization and localization of content, weights and measures;
• The app should follow accessibility and usability best practices;
• The app should enable collaboration between multiple users during all stages of recipe planning and preparation;
• The app should continue to be useful in low bandwidth and offline environments;
• The service should not collect or store any personally-identifiable information;
• All data transmitted by the app - whether to the service or to other instances of the app - should provide mutual content-integrity guarantees;
• The code to the app and service should be made freely available for inspection and modification under the AGPLv3;
• The app and service should not rely on any proprietary software or development tools.

There's a lot still to do in order to deliver on all these principles, and we intend to be transparent and accountable as we progress towards them.

RecipeRadar aims to be a faithful and trustworthy companion for individuals and groups during all stages of meal preparation.

We're building the application as free (or 'libre') software because we believe that developing the project in the open and with the ability for our users to inspect it, modify it, and collaborate on it produces significant additional value for everyone involved.

RecipeRadar's vision is to help anyone discover recipes that make best use of the ingredients they have available - bearing in mind factors such as shelf life, cost and availability, dietary requirements, flavour profiles, nutritional value, and seasonality of the produce in their local area.

To put it another way, it's a constraint satisfaction problem over a multi-dimensional domain of recipes, geography, time, and social networks.

We are strongly influenced by information retrieval concepts, and view recipe search as a relevance optimization problem. Our corpus of documents is a set of recipes, and our queries are ingredients and constraints. By carefully tokenizing, indexing and scoring our documents and queries we can provide blazing-fast search results and improve our recipe recall and result precision over time.

The application should allow people to plan ahead and arrange the meals they'd like to prepare, and automatically create shopping lists that help them track the ingredients they need to find.

RecipeRadar should provide an intuitive list of instructions for preparation of meals, including diagrams to illustrate the steps required and time-based reminders of kitchen tasks.

We aim to transform text-based recipes into an open digital format that can be used to display the ingredients, steps, and progress of a meal. For example, given a free-text recipe for 'Vegetarian Spaghetti Meatballs' as input, we'd like to produce an output something like this:

All of this should be enabled collaboratively - with a preference for other users to 'opt-in' to any meal planning and preparation, rather than being assigned duties.

RecipeRadar Privacy Policy (2023-11-07)

Our contact details

• Name: OpenCulinary C.I.C.
• Email: contact@reciperadar.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/openculinary/

The type of personal information we collect

We currently collect and process the following information:

• During your usage of the RecipeRadar service: we do not collect any personal data about you.
• If you have a recipe website that is included on RecipeRadar: we collect public contact information for you as published on your website.

How we get the personal information and why we have it

We manually collect contact information from your website so that we can ask you for your consent to allow us to display thumbnail images and a website icon for recipes from your website when they appear in RecipeRadar search results. We do not assume that we can do this by default.

We do not share this information with anyone else.

Under the United Kingdom's General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the lawful basis we rely on for processing this information is that we have a legitimate interest.

How we store your personal information

Your information is stored securely.

We keep your contact details for an indefinite duration so that we can confirm whether you have provided consent, and to ask you on an occasional basis to confirm or update your consent.

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

• Your right of access - you have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information;
• Your right to rectification - you have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete;
• Your right to restriction of processing - you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circ*mstances;
• Your right to data portability - you have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organization, or to you, in certain circ*mstances.

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at contact@reciperadar.com if you wish to make a request.

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at contact@reciperadar.com.

You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO's address is:

The helpline number for the ICO is (GB) 0303 123 1113 and their website is https://ico.org.uk/.

Contributions

We're grateful for all of the feedback and ideas that have been incorporated into RecipeRadar.

• Kate, for support and understanding, and helping to keep the project on track;
• Joe, for providing some of the first user feedback on the application;
• Gareth, for encouraging the addition of browser history navigation;
• Steve, for providing advice on infrastructure technology selection;
• Kieran, for illustrating the benefit of ingredient spelling corrections;
• Hilde, for early user feedback, user interface design commentary, and explaining recipe exploration challenges;
• Ed, for providing perspective about the project's goals and offering context from personal cooking experience;
• Craig, for conversation and advice about system uptime monitoring;
• Simon, for architecture and system design discussion;
• Grant, for providing some real-world use cases as quality tests;
• Monica, for creating user interface designs and features, including the ability to click-to-highlight recipe directions;
• Citra, for effective feedback on the application's design;
• Susan, for identifying issues with the recipe search user experience and result relevance;
• Liz, for canvassing feedback about recipe search accessibility and usability;
• Sam, for consultation and ideas regarding marketing;
• The recipe-scrapers massif;
• The Hacker News community, including banakkaffalatta, em-bee, nickff, PhillyG, zmix and zepearl for their commentary, ideas and discussion.

RecipeRadar is dedicated to the memory of Paul Addison, whose patient guidance with a BBC Micro computer led to at least one developer's interest and career in software development.

Technology

RecipeRadar is built on top of the best open source software we can find for each of the specific problem areas we've encountered during development.

We recognize the effort and hard work that goes into building these tools, and the value we derive by using them is a big factor in our decision to provide the source code for RecipeRadar itself to the public.

Included below is a list of some of the key software we use at various layers of the RecipeRadar technology stack.

Infrastructure

• GNU/Linux on our self-hosted server;
• Kubernetes to orchestrate our microservice containers;
• Project Calico to provide our container network fabric;
• CRI-O as our preferred container runtime;
• nginx to terminate inbound requests and as an ingress controller;
• Squid to cache outbound requests;
• PostgreSQL to model, persist and query relational recipe data;
• OpenSearch to index and efficiently match ingredient and recipe contents;
• RabbitMQ as a background task queue.

Services

• Apertium for first-pass automated translation of language strings;
• lighthouse to assess site performance, accessibility, and other best-practices;
• imageproxy for image thumbnail generation.

Libraries

• flask as a base for Python microservices;
• hashedindex to build in-process inverted indices;
• ingreedypy (a Python port of ingreedy) to parse ingredient text;
• recipe-scrapers to extract content from public recipe websites;
• pint to parse and standardize ingredient quantities;
• i18next as an internationalization and localization framework;
• serwist to streamline delivery of the frontend application;
• select2 to render input selection autosuggest fields;
• feedback.js (including multiple developments since origination, and the html2canvas library that it depends on) to gather user feedback.

Formats

• RecipeML to represent recipe metadata.

We're keen to hear of any alternative technology recommendations.

Whenever possible we contribute fixes and modifications we make back upstream; ideally even before deploying them ourselves.

We believe it's important to write software contributions in a way that offers reusable value to others, provides backwards-compatibility when possible, and that is optional to use unless it provides a clear benefit (with few negative externalities) to the vast majority of existing use cases.

RecipeRadar is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3.

The license to this software is bundled with the application and is also available to read online.

Included below are the licenses for the dependencies of this application.

The license for the packages that this application depends upon are available to read here.