Having your mother around is one of the greatest blessings in life but there’s only one time we dread her presence. It is when she comes over to ask the persistent question, “What to cook?” or “What do you want to eat?” This seemingly innocent question can often lead to a heated debate, a flurry of opinions, and even family feuds. This culinary conundrum has plagued Indian homes for generations and would continue for another few generations if not for Blinkit’s Engineers who developed the Recipe Rover.
The Melting Pot of Flavours
India, with its diverse regional cuisines and plethora of spices, is a melting pot of flavours. From the fiery curries of the South to the rich gravies of the North, every region boasts its distinctive culinary heritage. Not just the geography but our seasons, and our festivals, all determine our food choices.
Consequently, this volcano of choices adds to the difficulty of deciding what to cook. The tantalising array of options becomes a double-edged sword, leaving us in a state of delicious bewilderment. This is followed by the art of negotiations and/or rivalries.
Even if we are fortunate enough to decide on a meal, there are high chances of not finding the ingredients at home and nobody will have the zeal to walk a few blocks away to the general store. This further complicates the ‘simple’ act of deciding on a meal.
Blinkit taps on an opportunity
The cool crew at Blinkit realised this never-ending struggle in most Indian households and decided to offer a solution. They started by creating recipes on their website that would help people with choices on what to cook. However this was both a time-consuming affair and it was almost impossible to cater to the various needs based on season, festival and region.
Also Read: SN Spotlight: Disha Madan And Her Paid Dancer Jhula Will Get You Hooked!
In their blog post, Vaibhav Bhutani from Blinkit stated, “We wanted to make instant recipes as good a feature as instant delivery. Not only that, we only wanted to show you recipes we know you will be able to make right away (because we have all the ingredients available). But creating this convenience was time-consuming to build: it took us 3-4 hours to build just one recipe page. We were also limited by our understanding of cuisine and event-specific recipes. Regional and festival-specific recipes were an even bigger problem. Over time, there were multiple missed opportunities for us due to the high lead time and lack of context.”
Recipe Rover
Technological advancement never disappoints humans and neither did it disappoint those at Blinkit. To satiate their will of delivering recipes to their users, the folks at Blinkit turned towards AI.
Using Chat GPT 3.5 and Chat GPT 4, they generated close to 50,000 recipes in a matter of a few hours. To add to it, they used their customer preferences data and infused it into their existing elastic search system using their API.
To elevate the customer experience, the team at Blinkit crafted appealing recipe images using Stable Difusion 1.5 and Midjourney techniques. These AI-generated recipes now had a fine-tuned image of how the dish would look, which helped Blinkit attract more traffic.
This is not all. The Vector Search in Recipe Rover will help the user identify the ingredients in the dish and find them on Blinkit just with a few simple clicks. So the customer is sorted with the recipe, how it should look and the ingredients. The explore section will help the user find new recipes as per their taste.
The many benefits of Recipe Rover
- Recipe Rover will simplify the process of meal planning by offering recipes and ingredients with a few clicks.
- Specific recipes owing to season or event can also be found using Recipe Rover to avoid any kind of FOMO
- Recipe Rover will also provide the nutritional know-how of the recipes helping the user make a more informed choice.
While Mother’s Day has just gone by a few days back, Recipe Rover will definitely be a gift our mothers wouldn’t mind. No flying chappals for this gift, for sure! Take our money, Blinkit. Now!
