No family recipe dies with the person who made it. Taste of Home turns a half-remembered flavour into a recipe you can cook, taste, fix and pass down, with the whole family adding what they remember.
2. Why people can't resist it
Grief with something to do. Missing someone is passive. Cooking their dish on a Sunday is an act of love you can repeat.
The getting-closer loop. Every version scores closer to the memory. "94% like Grandma's" is the most motivating number in a kitchen.
The family chorus. Cousins, aunts and siblings each hold one detail ("she always added the crunchy bit last"). Asking them pulls the whole family in.
3. How it works for real
Describe: free text or a voice note. Speech to text with Whisper or a Gemini Flash audio call.
Ask: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) picks the 6 sensory questions that best split the candidate dishes, from a taxonomy of texture, acidity, aroma, colour, occasion and region.
Propose: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT) generates 3 candidate recipes with a confidence score, grounded in a regional recipe corpus and a flavour compound table, and explains which memory clue each ingredient answers.
Revise: tasting sliders become a structured diff (change quantity, add, remove, change technique). The LLM writes the new version and the reason for each change. Versions are stored like commits.
Localise: an ingredient graph maps each item to substitutes and shop types for the chosen city (London, Toronto, Dubai and more).
Card: an image model (Flux or Gemini image) paints a dish illustration in the family card style. Optional TTS reads the recipe aloud in a warm voice while you cook.
4. Cost per use
Questions plus 3 candidates: about $0.02. Each revision: about $0.01. Card illustration: about $0.03. A full journey to a v3 family card costs under $0.10.
Free: unlimited remembering, 3 versions per dish, 1 family shelf. Family plan ($4 a month): unlimited versions, shared shelf for up to 30 relatives, printed card packs, and a yearly hardcover family cookbook at cost.
5. Growth loop
Every dish asks 2 to 5 relatives for a memory by link. Each relative lands on the card, sees the shelf, and remembers a dish of their own. The family card is made to be screenshotted into the family group chat.
6. Risks and guardrails
Food safety: allergens flagged on every version; preservation and fermentation steps follow tested guidance, never improvised.
Honesty: the app says "candidate" and "confidence", never "this is her recipe". The family decides what is true.
Privacy: shelves are private to invited family by default. Memories of the dead are written by their family, removable by any close relative.
Cultural respect: dishes keep their own names and regions; no "fusion" relabelling.
7. MVP build order
Describe screen plus 6 tap questions and a Claude prompt that returns 3 candidates as JSON.
Recipe view with versions and a diff renderer.
Tasting sliders that produce v2, v3 with reasons.
City substitution table for 3 cities.
Family card with memory invites by link, then the shared shelf.