Whisk: AI Cooking App
Every recipe you've ever saved — finally somewhere you can actually find it.
Independent Founder
Case Study · 2024
About this product
AI-powered recipe manager that imports from TikTok, Reels, and any website in seconds.
Timeline
18 weeks
Category
Web & App
Delivered
2024
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Overview
The situation
Home cooks were drowning in saved content. TikTok bookmarks, Instagram saves, Pinterest boards, browser tabs — recipes scattered across every platform with no way to actually cook from them. The founder wanted to solve the last-mile problem of recipe discovery: not finding recipes, but keeping and using them. Whisk was built to be the single home for every recipe a person will ever want to cook.
Challenge
What we had to solve
The core technical challenge was multi-source AI extraction — reliably parsing not just recipe websites, but cooking videos from TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube where ingredients and steps are spoken aloud, shown on screen, or both. Every source had a different structure, format, and anti-scraping posture. Beyond extraction, the product challenge was designing a meal planner and grocery list experience intuitive enough to replace deeply entrenched habits like notes apps and screenshot folders.
Recipe Import — TikTok & Reels
Digital Cookbook & Collections
Weekly Meal Planner
Smart Grocery List
Case Study
How we built it
Discovery & Competitive Audit
We mapped the existing recipe-saving landscape — Paprika, Mela, Yummly, AnyList — and identified a clear gap: none handled social video natively. User interviews with 15 home cooks confirmed that 60%+ of their saved recipes were stuck in TikTok bookmarks or Instagram saves, completely inaccessible when actually cooking.
AI Extraction Pipeline
We built a multi-modal extraction engine capable of processing URLs, video links, and raw text. For video sources, we combined transcript extraction with on-screen text detection and visual frame analysis to reconstruct structured recipes. The pipeline handled TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Threads, and any recipe website — normalising all output into a clean, consistent recipe schema.
Core App — Recipe & Collections
We designed and built the digital cookbook layer in Flutter: collections, tagging, dietary filters (vegan, gluten-free, keto), ingredient-based search, cook mode with screen-always-on, and one-tap serving scaling. Every interaction was validated against the principle that the app should feel faster than a notes app, not slower.
Meal Planner & Nutrition Engine
We built a drag-and-drop weekly meal planner with automatic nutrition calculation — calories, protein, carbs, and fat — derived from extracted ingredients and matched against a nutrition database. The weekly nutrition summary view gave users an at-a-glance picture of their planned diet without manual logging.
Smart Grocery Lists
The grocery list engine aggregated ingredients across multiple recipes, automatically deduplicated overlapping items, consolidated quantities, and sorted by supermarket category. Users could add entire week's meal plans to a live shopping list in one tap, with real-time check-off sync.
Monetisation, Launch & Store Optimisation
We implemented RevenueCat-managed subscriptions ($1.99/month or $19.99/year for Whisk Pro), configured App Store Connect metadata, and launched on iOS with a free tier that covered core import and collection features. Pro unlocked unlimited imports, nutrition tracking, and advanced meal planning.
Outcomes
From scattered saves to one organised kitchen.
8+
Import sources supported
TikTok, Reels, Pinterest, YouTube & more
<10s
Average recipe extraction time
from share to structured recipe
500+
Recipes imported at launch
across early adopter accounts
72%
Week-2 retention rate
users returning to plan or cook
$1.99
Pro entry price per month
lowest in the recipe app category
4.7★
Early App Store rating
from verified reviewer feedback
I had hundreds of recipes bookmarked on TikTok that I never cooked because I could never find them again when I needed them. Building Whisk was about solving that for myself first — and it turns out a lot of people have the same problem.
Iqra Kanwal
Founder, Whisk
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