I cook every single night for my family, and I've tried pretty much every food app out there. Recipe apps have great recipes, but that's it. The apps that are supposed to help you eat better mostly serve sad recipes, or no recipes at all. So I took the best of both and went a little overboard. Umay is a whole world around food and cooking, run by a grumpy tanuki chef who learned from four million recipes from all over the world.
Made for how you eat. The first screens ask what brings you here and whether you want to count. If you do, you get estimates with their sources. If you don't, "Eat well, no counting" removes every nutrition number from the app and keeps only the plate verdict. You can switch later.
Cook. Tell Umay what's in your fridge, or snap a photo of the shelf, and it writes tonight's dinner from anywhere in the world. The same chicken, tomatoes and lemon can turn into a South African bunny chow, a Mexican burrito bowl if you're in a hurry, or a milder Lebanese shish taouk. Every dish is made to keep you full. If you're missing something, Umay tells you before you start cooking. One tap plans the week. The shopping list comes sorted by aisle, in your units (lb and oz in the US), and it already knows what's in your fridge. Cooking mode walks you through each step with its own timers, and you can talk to the chef while your hands are in the dough.
Eat well. At home or eating out, snap your plate. If it's all there, the tanuki says so and leaves you alone. If it could be more filling, he suggests one thing to add, something you can actually find.
Learn and play. The Cutting Room shows where your steak comes from, cut by cut, with French and American butchery side by side. The Ocean and the River are living atlases of what swims and grows there, from the river's source to the open sea, and how to cook it. Kitchen mini-games fill the minutes while the water boils. Coming soon: Umay Town, a whole neighborhood to cook your way through.
- Nutrition & Healthy Eating (Influencer Award): Umay helps people eat meals that keep them full without asking anyone to count anything. When a plate could be more filling, it suggests one thing to add. When it's fine, it says so and moves on.
- Design: Umay has its own design system (ink on cream, lime and cobalt, hard shadows, no gradients, two typefaces), a grumpy 3D tanuki chef, and dish images generated in the same style as the app.
How we built it
Umay started as a web app and later got native shells: Capacitor for iOS and Android, on top of a FastAPI service with SQLite. Subscriptions go through the RevenueCat SDK: one entitlement, a monthly and an annual product, a one-week free trial on the annual plan, purchases checked on the server before Premium turns on, and restore purchases on the paywall. The pairing engine learned what goes with what from four million recipes. After that, your fridge and your mood tonight decide. Nutrition estimates come from public food composition databases (CIQUAL, USDA, Open Food Facts). The atlases and games run in the browser engine, with WebGL for the heavier scenes.
Nutrition data. No single database covers a home kitchen, so Umay merges three: USDA FoodData Central, Open Food Facts for packaged products, and CIQUAL, the food composition table the app started with. Open Food Facts search went down while we were building, so we now run our own index of 849,000 products, which answers in under 10 ms. Fuzzy matching once turned "romaine lettuce" into dried sea lettuce, with 9,190 µg of iodine: 99 of 1,757 recipes showed a micronutrient above 500% of the daily value, until matching learned to check food names and states. And 871 CIQUAL foods publish no energy value at all, so we recompute it with the EU formula rather than drop them.
The chef assistant. The first version passed its tools around as JSON inside plain text, and it broke in creative ways. It now uses real tool calls in a bounded loop, and scripted replays catch the classics: a recipe generated before you said "go", frozen gyozas "remade from scratch", a question about wine turning into a wine recipe. We fixed another one today: the chef couldn't see the ingredient basket, so "what can I make with this?" got "which ingredients do you have?" back.
Hiding numbers for real. The first "no counting" mode filtered numbers out of the text with regular expressions. Every attempt broke something else: "500 g of flour" vanished, "20%DV" slipped through, and one pattern took 70 seconds on a single input. The fix was structural: in that mode, the assistant never receives numbers in the first place.
Tone. I didn't want the plate reader to lecture anyone. So the verdict comes from fixed thresholds on protein, fiber and good fats, the wording is limited to one addition with no judgment words, and "it's all there" is an answer the app is allowed to give.
Shipping. RevenueCat product IDs came back with a base-plan suffix on Android and emptied the paywall. Sign in with Apple needed its own Swift plugin, because no package supported Capacitor 8 yet. Apple asked for a screen recording on a physical iPhone before approving. And on September 29, the day the app went live, the server hit its limit of 1,024 open files and went down for seven minutes; it now allows 65,536 and serves images from a separate pool.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
You get tonight's dinner from anywhere in the world out of whatever is in your fridge. You can use the whole nutrition side without ever seeing a number. The tanuki turned out to be useful: he delivers the verdicts, so the app itself never sounds preachy. And the app is live on the App Store, with Google Play in review.
What we learned
Every suggestion in Umay is phrased as something to add, and that one rule ended up shaping most of the product. I also underestimated store review: terms, privacy labels and account deletion took real work, and users benefit from all of it.
Umay Town. A whole 3D neighborhood that grows from your real cooking. Cooking earns, playing spends, and the games are never behind the paywall. The tanuki has more energy when you eat well and move, and gets sleepy when you don't.
Health and movement. Steps from Apple Health and Google Fit feed the town, and short workouts in the town park are counted on camera, so only real reps count.
Local producers and small shops first. Umay already sorts your list by store and finds groceries near you. Next, we want to send people to local producers and independent shops rather than the big chains: what you can cook tonight from what the farmers market, the butcher or the cheese shop around the corner actually sells, with those shops featured in the app.
Brand partnerships. Food brands and shops can live inside the world of Umay instead of in banner ads: their own shelf in the town's konbini, recipe packs built around their products, and a direct route to their store. We're already talking with a Japanese grocery store in Paris, a meal delivery service and an anti-waste app.
Moïko by Umay. A playful app for kids from the same world, with its first chapter already built.
And the Android app, as soon as Google Play approves it.
Free and Premium
Umay is free, with monthly and weekly limits: up to 5 new recipes and 20 messages to the chef a week, and up to 8 photo scans, 3 nutrition estimates, 3 dish images, 1 meal prep plan and 5 minutes of voice a month. Umay Premium raises them to up to 150 new recipes, 600 messages, 200 photo scans, 30 nutrition estimates, 60 dish images, 8 meal prep plans and 30 minutes of voice a month. It costs $6.99 per month or $39.99 per year, with a one-week free trial on the annual plan. Subscriptions by RevenueCat, billed by the App Store.
About the App Store page. Version 1.0.1 is in App Store review. It's a store page update: the new name (Umay: Cook the World at Home), new screenshots, and the Free and Premium details above. Until it's approved, the live store page still describes the old plans. The app itself loads its content from umay.food, so everything on this page is already live in the app, including this week's fixes: the new onboarding, Spanish, and the arcade.
Umay is not a medical device. Values are estimates, not medical advice.
Built With
- capacitor
- ciqual
- fastapi
- javascript
- open-food-facts
- python
- revenuecat
- sqlite
- usda
- webgl
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