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:
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:
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.
We currently collect and process the following information:
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.
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.
Under data protection law, you have rights including:
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 [email protected] if you wish to make a request.
If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at [email protected].
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/.
RecipeRadar is a recipe search engine and meal planner, built using HTML, JavaScript™ and Python.
The search results you can find using RecipeRadar are gathered from a variety of recipe websites around the World Wide Web, but we did not write the recipes, and we have not followed many of the recipes to test them.
Before a recipe from the web can be added into the search engine, our software reads each ingredient line (for example, '5 ripe tomatoes') and tries to find a named ingredient that it refers to. The ingredient names that can be found are managed by our team, and currently there are about two and a half thousand (~2,500) of them. A recipe can only be included in the search engine if the software is able to link every ingredient line to a named ingredient.
To extract the ingredient lines from a recipe's webpage, RecipeRadar uses a Python software library called recipe-scrapers. Unless recipe-scrapers can find ingredient lines in a webpage, it cannot be included in RecipeRadar.
Each search result includes a hyperlink to the webpage where the recipe was found, and a button to report any problems with it.
Please let us know if you find any search results on RecipeRadar that seem wrong, or if the hyperlink no longer opens the expected recipe, and we will do what we can to remove or improve those recipes.
The regulator for communication services in the UK is Ofcom, and you can register a complaint with them about our business practices if we have let you down and have been unable to resolve the problem for you.
One of the recommendations that Ofcom makes to search engines is that they should acquire web URLs that contain illegal content, and to scan their systems for those. As an alternative measure, we prefer to design our software to use restrictions like the ones described on this page that prevent harmful content from being included in RecipeRadar.
We're grateful for all of the feedback and ideas that have been incorporated into RecipeRadar.
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.
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.
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.
If you can help us reach our goals, we'd love to hear from you. Please read our code of conduct, and then contact us on Codeberg or by using the feedback form at the bottom of the screen.