Chef Tyler Florence Creates Personalized Recipe App

Tyler Florence has teamed up with Innit to create an app that he calls the kitchen equivalent of GPS.

Last October, at the Smart Kitchen Summit, the celebrity chef and 16-time cookbook author told the audience that “recipes are dead; they’re dead the same way paper maps are dead.”  

He went on to say that recipes have been one-dimensional, top-down dictations of a single dish. Home chefs don’t learn actual skills from recipes to push them forward in the kitchen, or how to customize dishes for dietary restrictions or preferences. And in an era in which we now tweak everything from our Starbucks orders to our poke bowls, customization is a must. 

SiliconValley.com reports that Florence has teamed up with Innit, a Redwood City startup, to create an app that he calls the kitchen equivalent of GPS. Innit provides personalized meal recommendations, customizable, video-based, guided cooking instructions and smart appliance connectivity to do things like preheat your oven. Someday, the company says it might be able to suggest foods based on your blood type or genetics, something that Habit and 23andMe have already started doing. 

Meals in the app are organized into categories such as Tacos and Wraps, Grain Bowls, Pastas, Chicken or Adaptive Roasts. They include calorie counts and can be customized 200 ways. 

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You enter your diet preferences, any foods you want to avoid or have allergies to and then AI produces results personalized for you. The app technology allows you to customize the number of servings, replace certain ingredients with others and shows very detailed and well-produced step-by-step videos based on the exact ingredients you use or have swapped out.  

The app is free on both iOS and Android – check it out. Tyler is right: The recipe as we know it is now a dinosaur.