Prepare Home Cooked Meals with the Project Foodie App

I know you’re tired of eating out every night but you either don’t know how to cook or you think cooking will take up too much time from your busy schedule. Well, I just learned of a new app called Project Foodie created by celebrity chef, Daniel Holzman, and his brother Emmy-winning TV Producer, Eli Holzman. This app allows you to review recipes, watch demonstrations on how to prepare your meal, and buy groceries that are delivered to your house. I recently spoke with Daniel as he told me more about this time-saving app.

What is Project Foodie?

Project Foodie is a passion project and collaboration between my brother who is a television and documentary film producer and myself a chef. It’s our attempt to bring our joy and love of cooking, cooking with family, sharing the warmth of the kitchen, and teaching the world to cook. It’s a web-based application that is really an all in one kind of cooking tool that marries recipes with the instructional aspect of how to physically cook along with the conveniences of modern technology to add in the procurement of groceries through online ordering. When you want to cook a meal and you don’t know how to cook, you have to resource so many different tools that it’s really prohibitively complicated and it is overly and unnecessarily complicated. So our idea is it’s all in one place.

Where did the inspiration for Project Foodie come from?

The inspiration came from my brother really not knowing how to cook. He’s more of a process-oriented person rather than a results-oriented person. He never learned how to cook because I did all the cooking in our family as a chef. There was one dish in particular that he absolutely loved that I made for him all the time and he wanted to replicate that dish. He asked me for the recipe but was unhappy with the results so he sent out a documentary filmmaker. They came to my house to actually film me making this recipe from start to finish and then used that as a technique to figure out what he was doing. He had really great results watching that video and following along and shared it with a number of friends. One of whom was Katie Vowles, who runs the whole project at this point but she was really inspired because she had a real fear of the kitchen. She didn’t have any kind of training and didn’t feel comfortable in the kitchen. So her experience was so empowering that she felt like it was worth sharing with the world in a bigger way. She then helped to convince my brother to expand it and ultimately growing it into what its become which is this application that we’ve built.

Who is the target person for Project Foodie?

The reality of the matter is that we’ve done a lot of testing and done videos with a lot of different people and iterated a lot before ultimately releasing what we have decided to release. One of the recipes was actually cooked by another chef and I learned so much watching him that I thought how funny, this was initially designed to be a resource for folks that didn’t know how to cook to teach them how to cook. But I was learning something, like a new way to cut an onion. I think ultimately we would like to see this become a really big resource almost like the Wikipedia of cooking where you’ve got a huge pool. You’ve got different chefs and every recipe under the sun. At that point, there would be expert recipes and it would be a great source for chefs to build a cookbook platform to publish their cookbooks. So I think that it could be really geared towards almost everybody of any skill level.

To begin with, I think we need to look at who we feel like we can impact the most. I feel like the reality is that everybody’s using apps. So our audience are folks that either really likes to cook but don’t feel confident cooking or people that want to cook but don’t know how to cook.

This seems beneficial for a single man who works late hours but still wants a home-cooked meal.

For me, that’s the inspiration for everything. I feel like the whole argument for people not learning how to cook and doing takeout is a false advertising argument towards empowerment whereas knowing how to cook empowers you to have the choice to cook if you want to. It’s cheaper. It’s faster. It’s easier. It’s more helpful or healthy depending on what you’re choosing to cook. I eat well every single meal and I eat for very little money. I cook for myself in half an hour from the time I leave for the supermarket. It’s faster than takeout. It’s cheaper than takeout and I get what I want and it’s great. It’s this joy of knowing how to do something well and being able to feed yourself, feed your family, and feed your friends. It’s a gift.

Can you just go through the process of finding a recipe to cooking using Project Foodie?

You’ll either scroll through or use the search function to find a recipe that matched what you are considering. Watch the preview and share the preview with anybody that you might be co-piloting the choice with at which point you would review the ingredients either in a list or video form and then choose to purchase. Create a shopping cart with the ingredients that you need, either adding all the ingredients or what ingredients you don’t have. Scale the recipe so that you know the number o portion sizes and then you either share your shopping cart with somebody else, text it or e-mail it to your spouse or order the ingredients directly through Amazon Fresh or Instacart. Then you would start to gather all of your tools and ingredients start the video and cook along.

How often do you add recipes?

We’ve been adding recipes about twice a week, although we’re scaling back for the holiday to about once a week. We had a lot of theories that we tested but we didn’t know exactly which recipes would resonate. So our goal was, let’s build a pretty wide variety of options then see what resonates. Obviously, it takes time with video. You have to film and edit. So, we’ve got enough content to push us through the holidays and push us through February based on what we think. Starting in the new year, there is more content coming. Ideally, we would accelerate the content.

What can we look forward to from Project Foodie?

Continued passionate iterations of our application based on what people want more of and need. You can look forward to more delicious food. You can look forward to not worrying about what you’re going to cook for your loved one on Valentine’s Day because everybody in the restaurant industry knows that there are few holidays that are super amateur to make a reservation and eat out. Probably the biggest one is Valentine’s Day and you should cook at home. So, look forward to that. You can look forward to hopefully hearing a lot more about us as we get more people to meet us.

Last week, I tried the Project Foodie app and I have to say now I think I’m a professional chef! Just so everyone knows, I do not cook often and I hardly have any groceries in my refrigerator. I live in New York City so my go to meal comes from the local bodega! But I’m getting older and know that I have to start eating better and I also realized how much I spend on meals on a monthly basis.

Using the Project Foodie app was easy. First I picked a few recipes and shared them with my Fiancé to see which one I would actually be allowed to cook After picking the Ribeye Smashed Potatoes, I looked at the ingredients and felt horrible because I didn’t have any of the ingredients in my house. I seriously didn’t even have butter! But it was okay because with a couple clicks I had the ingredients delivered to my door the next day using Instacart.

Next day comes and I’m ready to cook my meal. Surprisingly, I had all the tools to create the beautiful dish, which I have to thank my mother for because she continues to buy me kitchen-wear even though she knows I don’t cook. I began to prepare the food and I was able to follow along with the videos. Yes, I had to restart the video a couple times and hit slow motion but that was a benefit to me! For a person who is not use to cooking, cutting things in a specific way can prove challenging. I finished the meal and it came out amazing! The good thing is that my fiancé loved it, the bad side is now I’m being asked to cook more!

Project Foodie is perfect for the busy gentleman but also a great gift for the holiday! Click here to download Project Foodie.

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