Luckily, Nina has found a solution. Once a week, she has a meal-prep package delivered by a local, accomplished homecook called Sonya, through the Yeah! Meshi platform. Sonya is a great help for busy moms like Nina. Sonya supplies the main dish, and Nina prepares some rice, heats the meal prep, serves, and the dinner is ready. Compared to catering and on-demand food delivery, this is as convenient, but much healthier for her growing children. Her guilt is somewhat alleviated.

Similar to Nina, Sonya is also a mother. As is common in Jakarta, she gave up her career when she got married so she could concentrate on caring for her children and family. Cooking for mothers like Nina through Yeah! Meshi offers her a way to get back into work, and begin earning money again.

Each Tuesday she’ll wake early to prepare the meals her customers have ordered. The day before, Sonya will have checked the Yeah! Meshi app to see how many orders she has received and what ingredients she will need to purchase, heading to the market in the afternoon to collect them fresh from her trusted sources.

Working diligently, by around midday she has successfully cooked all the order and handed them to delivery bikes.

When she first joined Yeah! Meshi it was not easy for her to cook many different orders at the same time; however, she is happy to realise she is now better at time management and feels of sense of achievement and development in her cooking.

Customer’s positive feedback provides her with a great reward, which she loves. However, she has one more substantial reward. She cooks the same menu for her family, and her kids love Tuesday’s dinner especially.

“Mom, I love your food. I tell my friends every Tuesday is like a buffet and I feel like in a party.” Sonya smiles.

And the money helps, too. She recently upgraded her phone from old Android to a new iPhone with the money she earns.

Yeah! Meshi is aiming to create supplemental income for more than ten-thousand passionate homecooks, by supporting them in what they already love doing — cooking. Through this, we want to solve the food-issues of thousands of Moms across Jakarta. For us, enabling Moms to help and support other Moms through food is a beautiful partnership that we can help to foster.

Our operational model is designed with homecooks commitments and capabilities in mind — homecooks cook meals once a week, and their customers are limited to ensure they can keep up with demand. This helps busy mothers too — they don’t need to order food every day, saving time and mental exertion.

We believe that the number of home cooks will increase if we can successfully create a platform in which daily cooking generates supplemental income. This is Cookpad mission.

Enablers such as the internet, frictionless payment or on-demand delivery services are all available, and now the challenge is to design a solution well enough to make this behaviour change. There are several home-cooked meal delivery services in the world already, many of which we have carefully analysed. Our continuous dedication to experimenting and learning from failure has resulted in a good formula and solution for operations that make unit-economic sense, keeping higher margins for cooks than working at average restaurants. (continues…)

Originally published at https://medium.com on November 27, 2019. Click the link to continue reading.

Creating a platform where homecooks empowered by solving busy mom’s problem was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The reality for working Moms in Jakarta

Nina is a busy working mother with two kids. Living in a satellite town just outside Jakarta means she must spend around three hours commuting to her office in central Jakarta each day. This is everyone’s headache — the traffic in Jakarta is indiscriminate. Leaving home at 7:00 am and returning from work after 7:00 pm she is exhausted from the travelling and a long day at work, and although entirely understandable she feels strong guilt that she has no energy left for cooking for her family. Instead, she’ll turn to one of many convenient alternatives available to her — fast-food delivery, street food or catering — and spend what little free time she has left relaxing with her family.

This is the reality for thousands of working moms in Jakarta, and many have it much worse with commutes upwards of two-hours each way. The overloaded transport infrastructure, coupled with easy access to fast-food, lacking nutrients or fresh ingredients makes it an uphill-battle to put good, traditional homecooked food on the table for families. The alternatives are just too convenient.

Luckily, Nina has found a solution. Once a week, she has a meal-prep package delivered by a local, accomplished homecook called Sonya, through the “Yeah! Meshi” platform. Sonya is a great help for busy moms like Nina. Sonya supplies the main dish, and Nina prepares some rice, heats the meal prep, serves, and the dinner is ready. Compared to catering and on-demand food deliveries , this is as convenient, but much healthier for her growing children. Her guilt is somewhat alleviated.

A day of a home cook.

Similar to Nina, Sonya is also a mother. As is common in Jakarta, she gave up her career when she got married so she could concentrate on caring for her children and family. Cooking for mothers like Nina through “Yeah! Meshi” offers her a way to get back into work, and begin earning money again.

Each Tuesday she’ll wake early to prepare the meals her customers have ordered. The day before, Sonya will have checked the “Yeah! Meshi” app to see how many orders she has received and what ingredients she will need to purchase, heading to the market in the afternoon to collect them fresh from her trusted sources.

Working diligently, by around midday she has successfully cooked all the order and handed them to delivery bikes.

When she first joined “Yeah! Meshi” it was not easy for her to cook many different orders at the same time; however, she is happy to realise she is now better at time management and feels of sense of achievement and development in her cooking.

Customer’s positive feedback provides her with a great reward, which she loves. However, she has one more substantial reward. She cooks the same menu for her family, and her kids love Tuesday’s dinner especially.

“Mom, I love your food. I tell my friends every Tuesday is like a buffet and I feel like in a party.” Sonya smiles.

And the money helps, too. She recently upgraded her phone from old Android to a new iPhone with the money she earns.

A platform providing income for thousands of passionate home cooks

“Yeah! Meshi” is aiming to create supplemental income for more than ten-thousand passionate homecooks, by supporting them in what they already love doing — cooking. Through this, we want to solve the food-issues of thousands of Moms across Jakarta. For us, enabling Moms to help and support other Moms through food is a beautiful partnership that we can help to foster.

Our operational model is designed with homecooks commitments and capabilities in mind — homecooks cook meals once a week, and their customers are limited to ensure they can keep up with demand. This helps busy mothers too — they don’t need to order food every day, saving time and mental exertion.

We believe that the number of home cooks will increase if we can successfully create a platform in which daily cooking generates supplemental income. This is Cookpad mission.

Enablers such as the internet, frictionless payment or on-demand delivery services are all available, and now the challenge is to design a solution well enough to make this behaviour change. There are several home-cooked meal delivery services in the world already, many of which we have carefully analysed. Our continuous dedication to experimenting and learning from failure has resulted in a good formula and solution for operations that make unit-economic sense, keeping higher margins for cooks than working at average restaurants.

Our biggest community.

Indonesia has been rising and so does the Cookpad community there.

The economy of Indonesia has been growing steadily, and the country is committed to developing for another 20 years. Indonesia is one of the seven countries where GDP per capita has grown at least 3.5% for 50 years*. The country strives to be a high-income country from mid-income before 2038 by enjoying its demographic bonus**.

No other regions’ Cookpad community is as large as the one in Indonesia. Not just sharing recipes online, but users meet up by themselves and organize several unique Cooking events just for fun.

Food and cooking is a way of life and source of joy and happiness for the majority in our community, and through “Yeah! Meshi” we hope to share this happiness wider to those that have found their love of food put under pressure by the demands of fast, modern family life.

We hope some of “Yeah! Meshi”’s busy mom customers will want to be home cooks someday.

* A report from MGI

** according to government official’s speech. A PwC report mentions the stats.

We are not just making a product…

We are, however, building a team and the capability of exploring new ideas and releasing them to the market continuously and rapidly. For the “Yeah! Meshi” project as an example, the tech and business teams are based in Bristol and Tokyo with the local operation team on the ground in Jakarta — we are working around the clock and globe. We regularly undertake SPRINTs in Jakarta to solve more significant problems as an entire team effort, and use three-day SPRINTs to scan models in different regions quickly.

As a product company, it is vital that we don’t make the mistake of developing products from a tech viewpoint, instead of from peoples’ life viewpoints. We visit their homes and kitchens, then observe or interact with home cooks to learn. Human-centric is easier said than done.

For techy readers, with regards to app development, we have been recently using Flutter for some projects, including “Yeah! Meshi”. It’s working well and pretty easy to ship to both iOS and Android from one codebase. This is great for us to move and test quickly with whatever device our users have and to keep the team small but mighty.

You can find more story on Yeah! Meshi Journey medium.

There are many ways you can contribute to this. Are you interested in this venture? Drop me a line.

Building a platform where homecooks empowered by solving busy mom’s problem was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Time flies. We have been quiet but it does not mean that we were hibernating. Just a year ago, I wrote this about the homefarm app.
And now, when you search on AppStore for “allotment”, homefarm is ranked #1.

(What you see first is an ad that changes all the time and this one doesn’t have anything to do with allotments.) You can see the RHS app ‘Grown Your Own’ coming in below homefarm. We are very happy because we built this app for allotment people and home growers.

Thank you to everyone who uses homefarm

We haven’t done any App Store optimisation or customer acquisition like paid social. We’ve been focused on building the best product we can, talking to our users to find out what they need and then building it.

All our growth has been WOM (yes, i could say organic…) Somehow people find the app and use it for their planning, tracking and interacting with the community as the team designed.

We will keep talking to people and making the app better and better. This is one small achievement on our journey — a sign of a green shoot if we’re really going to pursue the growing analogies. Thank you for reading until the end. Hopefully, our next update will be even bigger.

homefarm: an update was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve posted some non-work related things here in the past however now it’s time to share what my team and I have been doing. Without all the new experiences in Bristol, this idea would never have happened!

Our mission here at Cookpad is pretty big: to make everyday cooking fun. Because we believe that cooking is key to a happier and healthier life for people, communities and the planet. The Cookpad platform is the start and our product teams are constantly working on ways to make the platform better and better.

But there are other barriers that get in the way of people enjoying cooking. And that’s where the Business Innovation team comes in.

It’s a grand title for a team that started as a side project back in Autumn. It’s a really small team (three and growing…) and it really does feel like a very early-stage start-up at the round-the-kitchen-table stage.

Our focus is on taking an idea, building an MVP and testing it out to see if there’s something in it. We’re lucky because we have a clear mission so all our ideas are tested against how they contribute to achieving it which gives us a great guiding framework.

Here are the two questions we ask to filter our ideas:

1. What problem are we solving?
2. What (and how big) is the market?

After a couple of false starts we came up with an idea in October. Based on this hypothesis: most of us these days are very detached from where our food comes from or how it’s made. But as you cook more, you become more aware of what ingredients you use. The more you do something, the more ‘attuned’ or aware you become. It’s the same as other creative processes: when you play musical instruments, your ears become more sensitive and aware of sound; when you draw or paint, your eyes become more attentive and aware of colour and details. When you cook, your taste becomes more developed and aware of what you’re eating . When you grow fruit and vegetables, you become more aware of nature and everything that contributes to the harvest.

We talked to lots of people who grow their own fruit and vegetables: complete beginners and people who’d been doing it for years. The one thing they had in common was that they were all learning every day — from books, from the internet, from friends and family and neighbours… There’s a lot of wisdom out there but information-sharing is very individual and localised. We thought we could use the knowledge we’ve gained building Cookpad to apply a similar solution with home-growers.

To apply our two filter questions:

• The main problem that we heard from home-growers was how to know what to plant and when.
• In the UK alone, there are 27 million gardeners (according to the RHS). And there are an estimated 330 thousand allotments (according to the NSALG) with more than 90 thousand people on the waiting list.

Introducing Homefarm

We decided to create an app that provides information and advice to people growing their own fruit and vegetables and herbs.

We chose a simple sow-to-harvest format so people can look for information depending on the time of year as well as if they already know what they want to grow. And we built in a knowledge share so people can share their own tips. In November we built our first beta. Now that the app is live we’re focusing on making it better and better. It’s vMVP (very Minimum Viable Product).

We’re working on the design and we’re developing the content based on the wisdom we hear and see in action among everyone who’s growing their own produce.

And we’re testing it with lots of people around the UK — as well as in our own mini-garden created in our Bristol office! So more news to follow soon.

P.S.

When we talk to home-growers there’s another common problem: at harvest time, there’s always a surplus whether it’s radishes or courgettes! While friends and family (and neighbours and random passers-by) help out and there’s always the pickling jar, it’s the problem we’re going to solve next… watch this space!

Cookpad is hiring https://bit.ly/cookpad-jobs

How we build new products at Cookpad was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is located next to Bristol university’s Wills Memorial Building Tower, the landmark tower of Bristol city. It’s an admission free.

There are lots of exhibits and for you to time travel, some old maps of Bristol and it might be inspiring. You would know which streets or parks have been remaining unchanged for long and which are new. It’s like time travel.

You might also be interested in finding some paintings by “Bristol school” artists. Thanks to them we can think of the Bristol of about 200 years ago.

File:Francis Danby - The Avon Gorge, Looking toward Clifton.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Francis Danby is one of leading Bristol school artists. Thanks to ARTUK, you can find many of his artworks, and some are scenes which “Bristolian” can quickly tell where they are captured.

Paintings tell the past, did you know that big turtles were traded in the town?

File:Samuel Jackson - The Avon near Bristol.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Samuel Jackson, the other Bristol school artist, captured the moment. You can find the boatload of turtles by the pier and a man carrying one on his head in the painting. They are big.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened in 1864 slightly after the Bristol school artists were very active, so mainly we don’t see the bridge in their paintings. Then, it is an interesting fact that Samuel finished the picture in 1840 and included Suspension Bridge.

It’s fun to feel the life of people in the past, isn’t it? What would you explore?

Let’s walk, run or bike to the current scene!

You may want to visit the current scenes after watching some masterpieces.

File:Danby AshtonMeadow.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

For instance, where Francis captured is about 15 min bike ride from the museum.

The Route 41 is an excellent pathway alongside the river, opposite side of Clifton; you can enjoy walking, running or bike ride. Take this 41 from the place above photo was taken, down the river you can see calm, quiet vast rural scenery.

Why don’t you put yourself in the history, compare the past and now in Bristol by your ways?

Have a great weekend.

A weekend idea to see Bristol now and then was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aquaponics would make it possible. It’s a way to farm fish in a pool and grow vegetables hydroponically water pumped up from the pool. The water is well fertilized from excretions of fish. The water is pumped up to the vegetable plant. It is from ancient times. It is very rough explanation; if you want to know more, you can find more on Wikipedia.

Projects

There is a community-based aquaponics group in Bristol. I participated one meetup and I felt its excitement. They were very kind and gave me a lot of information. Learn from local community is great.

Welcome

I also visited GrowUp in London. They have a complete system in a rooftop container.

I heard from one of the leaders of GrowUp that tilapia is a common fish used for the aquaponics (I have never eaten tilapias, but I found quite a few tilapia recipes on Cookpad, by the way.)

Tilapia recipes - 363 recipes

There is a commercial scale aquaponics farm in California.

HomeKit

I researched if there are handy kits straightly installed to home, there are couples of them.
From Etsy

Indoor Planter Garden, Live Plants, Aquarium Decoration, Herb Garden, Gardening Kit, Aquaponics, Herb Planter - $999.99 USD

From Japan

AquaSprouts SV | Aquaponics Kit | Aquaponic Supplies | アクアスプラウトSV | さかな畑 | アクアポニックス栽培キット

If you want to learn aquaponic gardening, this is a bit old but there is a good course at Udemy.

Aquaponic Gardening: Growing Fish and Vegetables Together

More

Would it be a solution for food production on Mars? I do not want to introduce one source, but if you google “Aquaponics Mars”, you will see many exciting projects.

I want to explore, as a hobby, the possibilities such as
* Easy installation for small garden
* More expensive and tasty fish such as trouts or river eels.
* Solar battery powered water pump backed
* Growing vegetables not in a watery sponge but with wormy compost and feed the worms to the fish

There are many interesting aquaponics projects all over the world, and I am catching up. 🐟🥗

Aquaponics was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three first happy things

1. Green

To a man from Tokyo, a well organized and artificial city, Bristol looks green and full of nature. Substantial green parks are everywhere in the city and just 15 minutes drive away, you can see beautiful farms, sheep or cows on grass fields.

2. Food

Some of my friends sympathetically told me, “ You can not expect good food in the U.K.”. Now my view is different. There are so many varieties of tasty vegetables and less expensive at supermarkets than in Tokyo. I enjoy shopping at a farmers market in my neighborhood every weekend.

Availability of suitable meats is also a plus, especially beef for me. I went some steakhouses, but steak by myself at home is perfect.

3. Weather

Same as the food, “ You can not expect good weather in U.K.” told by my friends. It isn’t true. It’s not about good or bad, but just different. Far better than expected.

I learned an unusual expression, “In Bristol, there are three seasons in one day.” It is true that we have a very clear sunny moment and a hailstorm in the same day.

Three first surprises

1. Access to fresh fish

It is not easy. There are some very good fishmongers in my neighborhood, but variety is not enough for me and twice or three times as expensive as those in Japan.

As I love fishing, I am thinking to source them by myself. I have done mackerel fishing once in Brixham. It was effortless, caught a lot and tasted great. Cooking and eating fish which I catch for myself is such a great experience.

2. Day length volatility

In Tokyo, the sun never shines after 8 pm in summer, or it never sets before 4 pm in winter. I know this from textbooks but living here and experiencing it is a different story. Summer is very cheerful; winter is a bit melancholy.

3. Hard water

Tap water tastes different. I feel different when taking a shower. I did not know I needed to put some water softener in dishwashers or washing machines.

Now, I became a little British to the extent that I drink nearly ten cups of tea and talk about the weather every day. There are lots more to learn and get surprised. I will keep enjoying new experiences and life in Bristol!

Move to Bristol was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.