Whipped Up 2.2 Social Release

I quit my job a few years ago to lead a more meaningful life. I wanted to help reduce the barrier between healthy and sustainable eating habits and the demands of the modern lifestyle. I tried many approaches and learned much on the way. At some point, by this time last year, I settled into something I could do: create a food social network. Today, I’m happy to announce that the project has come full circle with our mobile app published in the Apple App Store (We’re working to get the app through the Play Store soon!).

Why does this issue matter?

Food waste is a massive problem in the world. To put it into perspective, only with the food wasted in the US every year, two countries of the size of Argentina could eat for free. However, waste is not the only issue tied to people’s relationship with food. There is a massive industry around diets, health, and appearance that causes problems in people ranging from anxiety to eating disorders. There is also a pollution component related to the carbon footprint of food items for production and distribution. Finally, there is a monetary component to the problem: people overspend on prepared meals and feed the illusion that cooking is either difficult or too time-consuming. While this is partially true, it is still vital cause it’s the link between us and the natural world.

Enter Whipped Up

I spent long hours thinking of the best way to tackle these issues with technology, only to face a frustrating reality: It’s not a lack of information that keeps people from cooking more. It’s a lack of motivation. There is little one can do to motivate anyone because motivation comes from within. However, I got a bit of inspiration from my day-to-day routine. I post photos of my home-cooked meals on my IG to motivate myself to cook more because I’m addicted to instant gratification; I can leverage this addiction to my benefit. Because of this, I realized that maybe the only thing I could do was create a platform where people could do this. Cook, post what they cook, and share their recipes. Also, cooking something delicious that a friend 'whipped up' makes the process less intimidating. It’s easier to relate to friends than to professional chefs.

Finally, there is a community aspect to it. Modern life is transforming communities, and life is much more individualistic than in the old times when we relied on each other to survive. I wanted to bring back the communal aspect of food.

Try out the App

Please give the app a try! You can do so by going to https://whippedup.app or installing the app in the Apple app store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/whipped-up/id1632701514 if you do, please follow me so I can see what you’re up to! My profile is https://whippedup.app/chef/juancavallotti I’ve been posting recipes of my improvised meals.

A bit About the Tech

I’ve been interviewing for jobs lately, and my interviewers have been consistently curious about my tech stack for Whipped Up. I will outline a few bullet points here just because I love tech:

• Google Cloud Platform and Firebase: I rely on Google’s infrastructure to deploy and monitor all my services. In total, I have 6 independent containers that run everything from ML models to business logic, APIs, and the web layer.
• NEXT JS for the web: I have over 20 years of experience building web content, and I’ve never seen a framework like this. It’s very fast, clean, and well-organized. Next leverages React for both client—and server-side rendering. Learning Next was also my first contact with React, and I can’t state how impressed I am with React and PyTorch. Meta is doing things right with these frameworks.
• Nest JS for the backend and APIs: For many years, I’ve been a Java guy, relying on the Spring framework and J2EE to build solid backends. Nest brings those solid foundations that make lasting software to the modern node world.
• React Native: Over a decade ago, I wrote a blog post disapproving of multi-platform mobile app development frameworks. I was completely hopeless at the time that anyone would build something to produce good-quality software. React Native proved me wrong. In less than a month, I could write all the UI for iOS and Android using this platform, and it feels like I wrote these apps on the Native platforms. I love to be proved wrong.
• Python for the rest: I still don’t believe Python is good for production code, but much of the research, especially around machine learning and scripting tasks such as DB seeding and cleanup, can be extremely easy thanks to tools like Pandas, NumPy, PyTorch, and Jupyter notebooks.
• OpenAI: I’ve leveraged the power of GPT-4 to help you post your recipes. You need to do very little writing; GPT -4 will make things look professional, so you don’t have to.

Gratitude to the Team

Finally, thank you to two individuals who walked this path with me—taking meetings, brainstorming, coding, and testing.

• Leonardo Chinigioli: He has been an absolute rockstar in mobile app development. Always advocating for the right user experience, he built and maintained the native iOS versions of the app until we decided to move to React Native so we could combine our efforts instead of doing the same thing for both platforms.
• Belen Giraudo Velez: She has helped test and promote the app while also providing invaluable usage feedback and ideas to improve it and make it more popular.?

?

They have been consistently working in the project for over a year, because we all share the same passion and have fun at it!

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading up to this point and joining me in celebrating this milestone. I would love to see your cooking on the whipped-up platform. If you’re passionate about food and want to help make the world a better place, I built this platform for you.

Thank you!