Parsley
Parsley takes a recipe from wherever you found it and then does the part a recipe app leaves to you. Cooking it.
Product design and engineering · In development
Context
The problem
Most people cook on a schedule. Dinner has to be on the table on a Tuesday night. The week was planned on Sunday, and the pantry has not caught up with it.
A recipe app has nothing to say about any of that. It stores what you found and hands it back unchanged — the same six servings, the same assumption that you will hold four steps in your head while two pans are going. The arithmetic and the timing are left to the cook, who redoes them from scratch every night.
Method
The approach
Parsley is built in two halves. One gets the recipe in. The other gets the meal out.
Capture
A recipe arrives as a URL, a TikTok, or a photograph of a handwritten index card. Parsley reads all three into one structure, so nothing after this point has to care where the recipe came from.
Execution
Getting a recipe onto a screen is not the hard part of dinner. The hard part starts once it is there, and it is different every time you cook the same dish.
Scale
The recipe serves four and you are feeding seven. Or you are not cooking to a number of people at all — you are cooking to half a squash and whatever else survived the week. Parsley recalculates the quantities, and the steps that depend on them.
Diet
Most apps treat a diet as a filter, deciding which recipes you are allowed to see. Parsley adapts the recipe you want to the diet you keep.
Prep
A week of cooking is one job, not five separate ones. Parsley finds the work that repeats across it and batches it into a single pass.
Timing
Several dishes have to land hot at the same moment. No recipe helps with that, because each one is written as though it were the only thing in the kitchen. Parsley puts them on a single timeline and says what to start, and when.
Position
What makes it different
A recipe app is a filing cabinet. Parsley is a sous chef.
Storage is a solved problem. Execution is not: it is still done by the cook, in their head, under time pressure, and it is the part we are building.
The cooking problem and the software problem are being solved by the same people, in the same week.
Parsley is in development, and there is nothing to demonstrate yet. If you want to talk about it, or about something you are building, write to us.