Re:Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
by solatic on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @01:54PM
(#14798623)
> I think treating food preparation as equivalent to a Vagrantfile would really lose something along the way.
That's a neat idea, though, in a different direction. If you could implement some kind of standard recipe API and build a business around being a broker for commercial kitchens, wherein a customer inputs a recipe that follows a certain schema and an address, and the commercial kitchens respond saying either "no, we can't make that - we don't have the necessary ingredients / we're cooking at capacity / etc." or "sure, here's how much time it would take and here's how much it would cost." You would lose economies of scale found in most commercial kitchens, but customers would gain much more freedom over what they're ordering compared to pick-from-a-list traditional menus. Users could also search for highly rated recipes from around the world and see if somebody local could make it for them etc.
That's a neat idea, though, in a different direction. If you could implement some kind of standard recipe API and build a business around being a broker for commercial kitchens, wherein a customer inputs a recipe that follows a certain schema and an address, and the commercial kitchens respond saying either "no, we can't make that - we don't have the necessary ingredients / we're cooking at capacity / etc." or "sure, here's how much time it would take and here's how much it would cost." You would lose economies of scale found in most commercial kitchens, but customers would gain much more freedom over what they're ordering compared to pick-from-a-list traditional menus. Users could also search for highly rated recipes from around the world and see if somebody local could make it for them etc.