Welcome to WizerFood - Part 1

This is the very first article published on WizerFood.com, at a time when the product isn't even officially released yet... but it's definitely time to start talking about what WizerFood is and what are its goals.

First off - who am I? I'm Joel, the principal author of WizerFood and I'll be one of your guides on your WizerFood journey. If you prefer to follow through videos or podcasts: watch for those delivery channels, as well.

WizerFood started with the idea that planning is good. You might be the type who plans aggressively; for example, have you ever used a spreadsheet to track something in your life? Or you might be the type to never plan - but get the sense that you probably should do it more. I'm somewhere in the middle, and I realize that everyone has their own style of planning, so one important goal of WizerFood is to be flexible. You'll see a slew of profile settings, grouped by categories such as Planning and Shopping, letting you customize how the app works at a fundamental level.

So is WizerFood all about planning for meals? That's its origin story, but it's grown to include tracking and planning for your day-to-day finances, as well as tracking virtually anything you can measure. For example, do you want to keep track of your weight? How many miles you've run? Your blood pressure? Might you have done this in a spreadsheet or in an app (or multiple apps)? WizerFood can do all this for you in a centralized way, with the benefit of intelligent charting, reminders to fill in missing data, and sensitivity control. The ability to import data into and export data out of the app means you can still use spreadsheets, or even use your data in other apps, if you want to. (This is your data!)

Back to the origin story... I tend to plan for up-coming meals, out as much as two or three weeks. This helps in a few ways; I can:

• Build lists for groceries based on up-coming planned meals. This tends to reduce the number of store trips (or on-line orders, if that's your preference).
• Pick meals that I either want to try, or select from old, previously used meals that I like - and I have a place to go to identify both things. Your previously planned items become actual events, with a confirmation process helping ensure your history is accurate. Your backlog can serve as a favorites list and also as a "want to try" list.
• Slide in "use leftovers" at strategic times, to help reduce food waste and spend.
• Identify some ingredients that by purchasing them for one meal, might produce an excess in my pantry (or in my fridge / freezer - I'm collectively calling this my "shelf"), and I could use them up by planning other meals on subsequent days.
• Make healthier choices, when I was actively dieting. (Bonus: tracking calories can be made easier.)
• Catch myself when I might be tempted to eat out too much; this helps from a budgeting standpoint, and in a tactical way - beyond the basic "I should cook more" that was easy to ignore without a concrete plan.
• Reduce the frustration of forgetting items, since lists are built dynamically.
• Plan my shopping trips ahead of time, based on when I think my schedule works best for it. List generation can see this and not include items that I might be shopping for later.

Wouldn't it be cool to have WizerFood understand your goals, and make intelligent suggestions? Some of this will be available on day one for WizerFood - some of it will improve and evolve with time. Suggestions and notifications are related: I want to have important details called out by WizerFood. For example, if a perishable item I purchased several days ago might have been partially used by a recipe, it'd be nice to get a notification that the remainder might be getting old and I might want to use it in a different recipe - which in turn can be suggested from a wide range of recipes that are actively collected through WizerFood's recipe crawling engine. (Think of it like a Google specifically for recipes.)

The value of automatically generating grocery lists can't be understated. In building lists, I also need the ability to add items manually - and quickly! Lists would ideally understand what's on my shelf and remove items I already have. Tracking items on my shelf should be optional, however: some may find it too much work to do full-on shelf management - and that's "okay."

As you might have guessed, I don't mind cooking and I find a large percentage of my cooking ideas on-line. It usually starts with a general idea; for example: "I feel like a fancy burger" or "I need to make something fast on Wednesday and want to use the Instant Pot" or "I bought this brisket at the store and need to use it"... which turns into an on-line search, which turns into finding something that looks tasty. With a web address in hand at that point, I want the ability to simply copy that address into my plan and have it become a functional recipe, ingredients and all.

To add another wrinkle, I like to watch food videos that often just list ingredient names, without specific quantities. I wanted a way to capture links to these videos and provide an easy way for me to "bulk load" the ingredients for these. For example, when shopping, if one of the ingredients shows up as "rice" - I like the flexibility in the moment to decide if I want to buy a 25 pound bag of rice, or go with something smaller. In other words, the actual quantity that I might pull from recipes isn't overly important to me - but that's just me, and I want WizerFood to offer different ways of shopping depending on preferences. Future posts will get into more detail about your options for balancing your shopping needs with your shelf.

The actual shopping process is designed to make your trek through your local grocery store easier. Items are categorized by the regions you find in most grocery stores, and anything that's considered a "default" can be changed by you. If you prefer, as one example, to put "orange juice" under "Frozen Goods" instead of "Drinks" - you can do that. Key actions such as marking items as "shopped" can be done with a single click, in turn burning down your "to shop" list, as you go. More features related to this are coming, such as the ability to do time-studies to optimize your list order, even more.

Initially WizerFood will be available as a responsive web application. A mobile version for iOS and Android will come in 2023, with an even better experience, tailored to your phone. A way I'm often using it today is to use the Calendar page on my desktop screen to do my planning and I use the Grocery List page on my phone when I'm actually shopping.

You might be wondering, "how much is this all going to cost?" My goal is to have a free tier for the product. It'll be fully functional, but have limits; for example, the number of scheduled items per day, the number of web links that you can parse per month, the number of days ahead that you can plan, and so on. Ads will also be more plentiful in the free version - something that has to be there to keep the lights on! Paid versions for the web app will likely be in the $19 to $39 range per year, depending on the tier. (This might be introductory pricing - more to come later.)

Since WizerFood is a young product, there are several things that will appear in future releases. (The initial public release is expected in late 2022.) It's also influenced by the activity of users: data quality improves with real-world usage, which is one of the reasons I'm excited about offering the product for free. Other road-map features include more advanced auto-planning, extensions for Chrome and Alexa, and a huge expansion of the number of recipes found in the WizerFood search engine. User input will guide us!

In the next article, look for more discussion about:

• Finances and budgeting. You can easily paint a picture of where your account balances might be in two months... six months... or longer. Gain a sense if you have capacity to put more aside for savings, or need to clamp down and spend less.
• Meal plans. You can combine multiple recipes and even free-form ingredients under a single label. (For example, include your preferred side dishes alongside your main course, without having to alter your main course recipe.)

Does all of this detail make you interested in participating in an early look program? We'll be inviting up to 30 people to a long-term trial of the product, as "early adopters." You can request entry to this program by providing your email address below. Note: we don't share your email address with anyone, per our Privacy Policy. Watch for invitations in the next few months.

I also have a short video here, which demonstrates the sign-up process for beta users, along with a few simple tasks, once you're logged in. Much more to come!