Mobile Mmm…recipe ideas on your phone

Need a recipe idea? Just pull out your phone. Whether you are out at the grocery store, relaxing on the coach or just killing time somewhere, you can now search through tens of thousands of popular recipes from all over the web on Say Mmm.

We recently added a new recipe discovery area on Say Mmm, and now have optimized the recipe search for mobile smart phones. You can just swipe the screen to go from one tasty recipe to the next, and when you see something interesting, scroll down to see the ingredients or similar recipes. When you find ideas you like, it’s easy to save them to your Say Mmm account or favorite social network. Post to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, or email it to yourself or friends.

Where do you get the app? Actually you don’t need an app as it all works right within your smart phone browser. The mobile site at m.saymmm.com uses advanced browser technologies to make it feel as smooth as an app, and if you miss having a single click action from your phone main page, you can add a bookmark to your iPhone or Android home screen.

Developing for Evernote

A couple months ago Say Mmm launched an Evernote Integration, and we wanted to share a little bit about the experience of developing for Evernote.

There were a number of reasons why we wanted to do an Evernote integration, and chief among them was the product fit.  Evernote has a great platform for saving and viewing all types of content across multiple devices, and a lot of recipes are saved on Evernote.  Say Mmm develops technology to help people do more with recipes, so applying that intelligence to recipes on Evernotes improves the user experience for both companies.  Say Mmm had previously developed ways to extend some of these features to blogs and other websites, and we viewed the Evernote API as a way to create a more integrated experience.  We also liked Evernote’s developer-friendly approach to showcasing integrations in the Evernote Trunk and in some cases through ads and on their blog.

We used the Cloud API and OAuth authentication and found it straightforward to set up and well documented. The forums and the Evernote team were also very helpful for a couple questions we had outside of that documentation.  It didn’t take us long to put together a beginning version of the integration.  We needed to have a triggering action to know when to create a shopping list for a recipe, and we deciding on using a “Say Mmm” tag.  This was unique enough that users weren’t already using it for something else, and it made it easy for users to keep recipes organized in whatever notebooks they might be already.  So when a user tags a note with Say Mmm, our servers get a notification with the note id, which we use to get the recipe information in that note and create a new note with the grocery list.  After some testing we also added note links back to the original note for easy reference and removed the Say Mmm tag from the original note, so it would be ready for use the next time, thereby making the tag work more like an action than its normal organizational function.

Next, we decided it would be a lot better if users could create combined shopping lists, like on the Say Mmm site.  This was a little more challenging within the Evernote environment because of the way notifications work.  We originally tried using a new tag to combine lists, and that worked fine if people only combined two notes at a time.  The problem though, was when the tag was applied to more notes at once, we would run into duplication issues.  Our server would get all the notifications at about the same time, meaning multiple combine processes would start and the same notes ended up being in  more than one of these processes.  There are some ways we might have been able to create a queuing process for handling notifications in sequence, but after some testing and thinking, we decided to go with a simpler approach of creating a separate note with a “Combine” button that would combine all notes within the “Say Mmm” folder.  This solved the technical issue of knowing when and what to combine by giving a single triggering action.  The other advantage of this was we could have simple directions in the note to help the user know and remember how to use the feature, rather than having to keep track of another tag for the combine action.   

From there, we did some more testing to smooth out the flows and the way everything worked. One thing that we found helpful was to optimize note headers to make it easier to see the difference between individual and combined grocery lists. We also found that adding images with different colors at the bottom of the notes made it easier to distinguish the notes, especially on mobile devices with smaller amounts of space, because Evernote would use those images as thumbnails in the list view of the notes.  In early user testing, the main thing that confused people was when adding a Say Mmm tag and not seeing the account automatically updated in some cases when the note was ready due to how Evernote does synching, so letting them know to refresh or synch the view helped.

We launched the Say Mmm integration on December 28 and have been very happy with the response and the results.  Our blog announcement was immediately picked up by a couple of the technology new sites we really like, The Next Web and Venture Beat.  Evernote also liked the integration enough to give us some free advertising on their site in the first month, which was a great bonus for us, and was very helpful for getting the word out to Evernote users.  Since launching, we have had had almost 10 thousand Evernote users add the Say Mmm integration who have created 56 thousand grocery lists through the service.  We found Evernote users to be more tech-savvy than the average Say Mmm user, and while it’s still a little early for measuring results, they also appear to have higher rates for retention and the likelihood to upgrade to Say Mmm premium features.   

One of the best things in our opinion about doing the Evernote integration was how it helped us improve our product.  While doing the integration, we decided to modularize the way our core functions work so when we add features and make improvements to grocery lists and nutritional estimates, it is simple to apply these anywhere on our site and to partner integrations.  This has already helped us to launch new features more efficiently, like we have done with our new recipe search and Amazon grocery offers.  It also makes it easy to integrate Say Mmm technology into other partner applications in the future.

In closing, a couple things that would be great to have from the Evernote API.  We’d love to see a way to add a custom button to the interface, similar to how WordPress plugins and Chrome extensions work. This would have made some of the things we did with tags easier, and is simpler for the user to understand for performing actions.   It also would be nice to have a better way for people to refresh the OAuth duration when they sign in again.  It is nice that users have been able to authenticate the Say Mmm integration for a year, but we are a little concerned about what will happen at the end of the limit, since when it expires it will just stop working in the user accounts, and there isn’t a good way for them to know why other than us trying to send them emails ahead of that time.

Amazon Grocery Offers

Did you know you can save on groceries on Amazon? And have items delivered to you for free? Amazon has a lot of good deals, but only for certain parts of your grocery list. The challenge is knowing which items to look for and comparing prices across items.

Say Mmm makes finding deals on Amazon simple by doing the work for you. Just click on the “Amazon offers” link when viewing any of your grocery lists on Say Mmm. Here is an example of how the Amazon grocery offers works.

And some reasons you’ll want to check it out:

Know what to look for – Some things are better to get on Amazon than others, and Say Mmm will check through your grocery list for only the best items. Packaged goods that you might buy in larger quantities or stock up on work best. Things like coffee, diapers, canned items, etc. Don’t expect to see any fresh produce or meat.

Check all at once – Instead of going and searching for everything individually, Say Mmm checks all the items on your list at once, refines the individual searches based on the item for better results, and shows you all the best offers on one page with the best matches first.

Compare prices – Like any grocery products, items come in all sorts of sizes, so Say Mmm makes it easy to compare prices by calculating the price per unit. Plus, we only show offers with free shipping (for orders over $25 or standard rates otherwise) to filter out a lot of confusing offers on Amazon that show lower item prices but have high shipping rates.

Easy check out – When you see items you like, you can click to add them to the shopping cart on the page and then when you are ready to order, it sends all the items to Amazon. Everything works with your regular Amazon account.

So while these Amazon offers won’t replace your trips to the grocery store for fresh items, it stacks up pretty well against bulk discounters like Costco. Save yourself a trip and some money. Amazon also has subscription offers for things you get regularly that can save you even more time and money.

Creating meals from recipes

Say Mmm has several free online tools for making meal planning simple, and we have now extended some of these features to work with our new recipe search. You can group recipes into meals that can be easily saved or shared with friends on Facebook, Pinterest, or your favorite social network. Just use one of the share buttons or copy and paste the URL. Plus when you are ready to go shopping, you can print out the combined shopping list for all the recipes in the meal.

Here is an example of a Chipotle Rubbed Flank Steak meal.

To create a meal with a recipe, click on the “Make a meal” link in the Meal section on the left. This will add your first recipe to the meal.

To add more recipes to the meal, use the search bar to find more ideas, and you’ll see the recipes currently in your meal and options to view or add to your meal. You can also remove recipes by clicking on the X next to the recipe names.

On the meal page, the name of your meal comes from the first meal in the list, but you can reorder the items by using the little up arrows in the right bottom corner of each recipe. You can also expand or collapse the view to show the ingredients or not. The nice thing about the grocery list is it does the organizing work for you by grouping items by area of the store, separating out pantry items, and converting ingredients into items you would buy in a store.

To make a new meal, just remove the old items and start over. With a free Say Mmm account, you can also save the meal and all the recipes to your account with one click. You can also plan out meals in the online calendar and use several other  meal planning and grocery list features when signed into Say Mmm.

Discover great recipe ideas

Discovering and sharing new recipe ideas is now even easier on Say Mmm. Our new recipe search feature lets you search for ideas from some of the best recipes from all over the Internet. People have saved hundreds of thousands of recipes on Say Mmm and a good number of those are recipes on public websites. So we made it simple for anyone to discover and use some of the more popular recipes from across the web, all in one place.

The recipe search also includes some useful features for customizing the results to individual tastes. You can specify ingredients you like or dislike, enter a number or range of servings, and select a preferred cooking duration.

When you find recipes you like, there are also features that let you do more with the recipes. You can see nutritional information estimates, check out related recipes at a glance, print out organized grocery lists, and save recipes with a click.

You don’t need a Say Mmm account to use the search and recipe features, so it’s easy to share the ideas with friends or on your favorite social network. With a Say Mmm account you can also save and organize these and other recipes in one place as well as use them with our other meal planning and grocery list tools.

Stay tuned. More features are on the way.

Fairy cakes or patty cakes?

Do you like fairy cakes?

What’s a fairy cake?

Before we get to that, see if you can answer this question…

SEO for Recipes

We are happy to announce a new SEO for Recipes tool that bloggers can use to optimize recipe text for search engines using the hRecipe microformatting.

There was a very interesting article in GigaOm by Kevin Fitchard about the idea that digital cookbooks should be more like digital music. Similar to how the standard of iTunes has revolutionalized digital music, the idea is that a standard media file for recipes could make it easier for people to store, organize, sort, and use digital recipes from all over.

There are millions of recipes online, but the challenge is they are spread across numerous sites and blogs that each have their own recipe formats, making it hard for end users to manage recipes in one place. Even the big search engines like Google can’t figure out the different formats well, and they have put out some guidelines on a standard hRecipe format for webmasters and bloggers to use, but it can be hard for non-programmers to figure out what it all means.

There are some ways to make standardizing recipes easier for bloggers, and if they are on WordPress there are some plugins of varying quality. The hRecipe plugin appears to be one of the better ones from our experience. But for food bloggers on other platforms, figuring out how to structure HTML the way Google and other search engines like it can be a challenge.

To help these bloggers, we have created a SEO for Recipes page that makes it easy to optimize recipe text. You just put in the recipe information and it will add in the right microformatting to the recipe HTML code. Then copy the HTML into the HTML view of your recipe post. We have also built in an option to include an automatic grocery list with nutritional info for the recipe, one of our popular Say Mmm features. This will add a simple “Grocery List” link that will open a new window where our technology will convert recipe ingredients to items you would get in a store, organize everything by category, and estimate nutritional values for the recipe. For more info on how it works and for other things bloggers can do with Say Mmm check out our page on grocery lists for blogs. 

WordPress Plugin - Recipes to Grocery Lists

Recently we added a Grocery Lists for Blogs feature, that bloggers could use to add organized grocery lists with nutritional estimates to recipes on any blog or website. Now for bloggers on WordPress, our new WordPress Recipes to Grocery Lists plugin makes it as simple as clicking a button to add a grocery list link or image anywhere in the recipe. When a reader clicks to view the grocery list, it will open up a new window on the Say Mmm website, where our technology will automatically create an organized grocery list that people can edit, combine with other lists, and print out. Here is how it works.

When the plugin is installed it adds a “M” icon next to the other “Upload / Insert” icons at the top of the text editor box.

1. Clicking the M icon lets you select a Grocery List link or image

2. The link or image will be added to the post at any place

3.Publishing the post activates the grocery list link

4. Clicking on the image or link it will automatically create a grocery list with nutritional estimates.

5. There is also a clean print view, and you can edit or add to the list

The Main Features include:

• Organized grocery lists – Say Mmm will use the ingredients on the recipe post to create a grocery list that is organized by area of the store with common pantry items like “salt” separated out at the bottom. It will also change things you use to cook, like “1 cup of shredded carrots” into items you’d buy in the store, like 2 carrots.
• Nutritional estimates – Based on the amounts and items found, readers can view a nutritional estimate and see a graphical breakout of the top things that affect nutritional values like calories, fat, and cholesterol. If there servings listed for the recipe, it will show the estimates per serving.
• Combining lists – Readers can even combine lists from multiple recipes into one organized list and even add, edit, and delete items, all without even needing a Say Mmm account.

Say Mmm on Evernote

Good news for Evernote fans…now you can use Say Mmm to do more with recipes and grocery lists on Evernote.

Millions of people use Evernote to remember and organize all sorts of information, and that includes lots of recipes and grocery lists. With our new API integration, people can use some of Say Mmm’s more popular features for creating and organizing grocery lists right on Evernote. It’s free to use these features, and they can be enabled simply by logging in with an Evernote account at: http://www.saymmm.com/evernote.php

Here are some cool things you can do:  

• Auto-create grocery lists from recipes - Add a “Say Mmm” tag to a note with a recipe or recipe link to create a new note with an organized grocery list and nutritional estimates for that recipe.
• Organize your grocery lists - Add a “Mmm List” tag to a list of grocery items to make a new note with check boxes and items grouped by category.
• Combine grocery lists - Merge lists in the Say Mmm folder into a single list. 

See how it works in this video:

With a free Say Mmm account, you can also plan meals with ease in the calendar, save time with smart grocery list features, share recipes with friends, and more. Plus, you can just click to send your plans and lists to your Evernote account to save and use on different devices.

There are several challenges in converting natural language text into organized grocery lists with nutritional info, so automatic grocery lists aren’t always perfect, but we think it will still save you from a ton of the work of typing and organizing everything. We hope you enjoy Say Mmm on Evernote and look forward to feedback and ways we can keep making it better. For more questions, check out our FAQ page.

What makes a recipe healthy…or not?

When you are trying out a new recipe, it’s nice to know how healthy it is, and we recently released a feature to estimate nutritional info for any recipe. Just copy and paste the ingredients or the link to the recipe here to get a nutrition breakdown and an organized grocery list.

Many larger recipe websites are nice enough to give you a the main nutritional values for their recipes, but sometimes it is hard to know why a recipe has the amount of calories or fat that it has. Since in most cases you only get totals for the recipe, you may not know which ingredients contribute the most to the various nutritional values and what you could do to change it. So Say Mmm has taken it one step further by showing the top ingredients that contribute to the calorie count, and we have just extended that to other other main nutritional values: Fat, Carbs, Cholesterol, Protein, and Sodium.

Take this example of Pancake-Sausage Muffins. Sound heavy? It’s actually not that bad at 120 calories a muffin (serves 18). But what about the sausage? Doesn’t that add a lot of calories and fat? That’s the interesting thing you can see with the ingredient breakdown. It turns out the flour and the butter add more calories than the sausage and the butter is responsible for most of the fat. Now the story might be different with regular sausage or if the recipe had more turkey sausage in it, but easily seeing it in proportion to the recipe gives a much better understanding of why a recipe may or may not be what you are looking for.

See the calorie breakdown by default:

Or change to view other nutrient breakdowns, like total fat: