Say Mmm Blog

Fairy cakes or patty cakes?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:01:00 -0500

Do you like fairy cakes?

What’s a fairy cake?

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

Which of the following is a common recipe ingredient?

a) Tatties
b) Rocket
c) Swedes
d) Chump

If you answered all of the above you are right. Tatties are potatoes, rocket is arugula, swedes are rutabagas (as well as nice people), and chump is a cut of lamb or pork. What language is this? It’s English, though many Americans might not ever have heard these terms used as food. Fairy cakes (UK) and a patty cakes (Aus) are words used for cupcakes.

There are a number of different English cooking terms used in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Some are different words for the same foods people use in the US, and some are for foods that are more common to local dishes in these different parts of the world. For some British flavor, check out some of the recipes on BBC’s food section, a great resource for UK recipes.

One of the nice things about our recent Evernote integration is that it has exposed Say Mmm to new audiences, and we have gotten a number of requests to extend the service to other languages. We’d like to have it work in more languages and countries in the future, and as a first step we decided it could do a better job in other English speaking countries. So we did a bunch of research, added hundreds of new recognizable terms, and updated our automatic grocery lists to work even better for people in other English speaking countries. We have probably still missed some things, and we’ll continue to make improvements over time.

SEO for Recipes

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:55:00 -0500

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

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 12:53:39 -0500

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

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:46:00 -0500

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?

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:48:00 -0500

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:

Combine grocery lists for recipes

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:15:30 -0500

We recently added a new public feature that will automatically create an organized grocery list with nutrition information for any recipe or recipe link, plus give a nutritional estimate. We have had a great response from our users and were thrilled to see it recommended by Real Simple as one of their picks of the week for ways to simplify your life.

When making a grocery list its likely you’ll want to include more than one recipe as well as a other odds and ends, and this is a feature we have had for people with free Say Mmm accounts. Now we are extending that to our public grocery list maker, so its easy for anyone to get a quick grocery list and nutrition estimate without logging in or even having an account.

After creating a grocery list on this page, just click the + icon at the top to add it to a combined list. We’ll remember it for you, and you can go back and add shopping lists from other recipes in the same manor. You can add and remove up to 10 lists and even click on edit to add and remove individual items. Then when you are ready to go to the store, just print it out.

Since it’s a public feature, bloggers can add smart grocery lists to their recipes just by adding a link or button to the blog. It works for individual recipe pages or just by having a button on the blog side area. When readers click on it, Say Mmm can figure out if they are coming from a page with a recipe and automatically create an organized grocery list that they can use on its own or add to a combined list of grocery lists from recipes from anywhere.

Here are some images of how combined grocery lists work. There is a new + button

Then you can add and remove the lists in your combined list

And when you are ready, print it out

Say Mmm a finalist at the Founder Showcase

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:39:04 -0500

We are happy to announce that Say Mmm was selected as a finalist in the upcoming Founder Showcase on Nov 8. The Founder Showcase is a quarterly start up pitch event that gathers top technology CEOs, investors, and early-stage companies in Silicon Valley for one action-packed night to network and help launch a promising start up to greatness. Michael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, will be doing the keynote for the event, and we will be one of 10 companies in the pitch competition for this event on Nov 8.

Wish us luck!

Get nutritional information for any recipe

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:09:00 -0400

Curious how healthy a recipe is? Say Mmm has your answer.

We are happy to announce a new feature, unique to Say Mmm, that will estimate nutritional information for any recipe. All you have to do is copy and paste the list of ingredients or the link to the online recipe. Say Mmm will not only show you nutritional and daily percentage estimates, but also visually display which ingredients contribute the most to the calories.

Some places online have nutritional information for their own recipes, but Say Mmm is the first site where you can just enter a URL or list of ingredients and get nutritional information for recipes from anywhere. There are a number of challenges in translating natural language recipes into nutritional estimates, and we have combined recipe and shopping list data from tens of thousands of Say Mmm users with nutrition facts from the USDA. It isn’t perfect, so we don’t recommend it for people following strict diets, but we think it works pretty well for getting a close estimate in the vast majority of cases. And the more people use it, the better it will get. Stay tuned for more.

For bloggers, you can share organized shopping lists with nutritional information for your recipes just by adding a link. See how easy it is here.

Automatic grocery lists for blogs

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:55:46 -0400

Food bloggers, what if you could just add a single button to your site that would convert any of your recipes into organized shopping lists? Wouldn’t that be a helpful feature for your readers? And if it were just a matter of copying and pasting some HTML text, with no installations or accounts to set up? Wouldn’t that be easy?

Well…now you can do that. And it’s free.

Say Mmm has a set of meal planning and grocery shopping tools that help people organize and use recipes from anywhere with less hassle, and we have extended some of these features to work directly on other sites. With just a click your readers can get an automatic organized shopping list without you or your readers having to install anything or even have a Say Mmm account.

Here is how it works. For most sites and visitors it works just by adding one of these image or text links to the recipe post or even the side bar or footer on your site. Then when a reader clicks on this, we can usually recognize the page that they came from by the referral information that browsers typically send, which is similar to how Google Analytics works. We then use this URL to find and automatically change the recipe ingredients from that page into an organized list of grocery items.

In some cases, websites may block sending this information or users may have firewalls or restrictive browser security settings that remove this information. If we can’t tell what page the user came from, we will just ask them to put in the URL or ingredients. There is also an advanced option where you can embed the link of the page that has your recipe in the link you put on your site. It is a little extra work to change the link for each recipe on your site, but the nice thing about this option is we will always know the right page to look for the recipe, regardless of any special settings the site or browsers may have. Anyone can also use this option to share a shopping list link for a specific recipe in an email or on facebook or any page that doesn’t have the actual recipe.

For Say Mmm users, we also have publishing options to manually create and organize shopping items for recipes, and even combine them into meal plans and recipe indexes. We launched these earlier in the year, and based on the positive response we got from those features, we decided to take it one step further and do more of the work for people.

Any questions, feel free to email info@saymmm.com

Automatically create grocery lists for online recipes

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:27:00 -0400

About a week ago, we added a new feature to automatically create grocery lists for recipes people enter in Say Mmm, an we are glad that a lot of people are enjoying how this works. Thanks again to everyone that sent us a message with feedback.

We are also happy to announce that you can now just enter a link to any online recipe and have a grocery list created for that recipe. There are a few other tricks we had to incorporate to make this work since there is a good amount of variety in how recipes are formatted and presented on different websites, plus there are a lot of other things on web pages that can make it a little tricky to find the right area with the ingredients.

We think its working pretty well now, though there are a few sites where it may not work or recipes that may need adjusting. In these cases you can edit the items individually, and we added an “Edit list” link where you can copy and paste just the ingredients for cases when it doesn’t find them correctly. So even in the tricky cases its still fairly easy to add a shopping list and we are continuing to make improvements.

Here is an example of how the grocery list looks when created from a link:

And here is the online recipe from Taste of Home:

Automagic grocery lists for your recipes

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:28:12 -0400

Automagic grocery lists for your recipes How many carrots in a cup of chopped carrots? Or ounces in a cup of sour cream? One of the pains of grocery shopping is that recipes are designed for cooking, not shopping. They don’t sell items in cups or teaspoons in the store, so you usually have to spend time figuring out what you need in terms of weights or items. Wouldn’t it be better if that was done for you?

We are excited to announce a new feature we have been working on for a while that will automatically check the ingredients in your recipes, convert those into items or weights that you would buy at the store, and categorize them by area of the store and whether it is a common pantry item or not. So for example, it will tell you that you need 4 carrots for 2 cups of shredded carrots or 8 oz for a cup of sour cream, and then organize these in a list for you.

We believe this is a first for the industry to dynamically convert regular text recipes and ingredients to items in shopping lists. It wasn’t easy, but using the hundreds and thousands of shopping lists items and recipes people have entered on Say Mmm, and a with a little fancy programming stuff (we won’t bore you with the details), we finally have something that we think works pretty well. It’s certainly far from perfect, but we wanted to get it out there, as we know it will save people a bunch of time from typing out everything, even if things need to be corrected here and there. Plus as we continue to update it, it will only get better.

As our users already know, it can be very nice to have a shopping list automatically added from a recipe or whole meal plan. Before, users would only have to enter the shopping list for the recipe once to be able to use it over and over, but we thought it would be even better if it was done for you the first time as well. Let us know how you like it, and stay tuned for more to come soon.

One-click Meal Plan Gallery

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:00:00 -0400

Trying out new recipe ideas is fun, but it can be a pain to put together a plan and a list of everything you need. Now you can discover and use sets of recipes and meal ideas with all the planning work done for you on Say Mmm. You can browse through shared meal plans, and with just a click see all the recipes on one page and an organized grocery list on another page. Grocery lists are dynamic, so you can edit or add to them before printing them out.

By extending our recently launched My Meal Plans features, anyone can choose to publish and share their meal plans in our Shared Ideas gallery. It is also easy to share the direct link to the plan right on a blog or website, or even send it in an email. Here are a couple examples:

The gallery has reviews, ratings and tagging features to make it easy for anyone to come to the site and find something that’s right for them. We have added a few recipes and ideas from our favorite blogs to get things started, and anyone can add their own ideas and find ideas from others with similar tastes or dietary goals.

Posted by Brian

Say Mmm graduates from the Founder Institute

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 12:31:00 -0400

We are happy to say that Say Mmm is now a graduate of the Founder Institute, having completed the intensive 4-month program this past week. The Founder Institute is both a set of educational sessions designed specifically for helping startups succeed, and also a global network of graduates and experienced mentors.

My goal in entering the program was to evolve Say Mmm and define the next big ways it could help people, and I was not disappointed. As a technology company, I believe it’s important to always be improving the product and service. Sometimes changes are gradual and sometimes you can make big leaps, and the Founder Institute pushes you towards making big leaps. I am excited about some of the ideas we will be rolling out and the direction Say Mmm is headed.

What’s the Founder Institute like? A lot depends on what you put into it, and how committed you are to turning your vision into reality. It isn’t easy, and of the 40+ founders that entered our class, only 12 graduated. No one said starting a company was easy though, so it is set up to help prepare you for the real world. The thing I liked most about the Founder Institute was the impressive list of mentors that are there to share their experiences and provide feedback and guidance to founders. Your peers in the program are another good resource, and you spend time in different working groups helping each other.

All in all a very good experience, and I believe the value of the program to Say Mmm doesn’t stop at graduation.

Posted by Brian

Full menu plans and grocery lists in a few clicks

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:05:14 -0400

Say Mmm makes it easy to organize meal and recipe ideas from anywhere in one place and easily use those ideas in meal plans and shopping lists. And now it’s even easier to use your favorite meal plans, because you can save the whole set of ideas as a plan. Then anytime you want to use the plan, just add a whole plan to your calendar with a few clicks, generate your shopping list, and you’re good to go. Plus when you add a meal plan to your calendar, you can still switch things around and customize it based on current specials or something new you might want to try. The difference is it’s much easier to start from a whole plan and swap things out than recreate a similar meal plan.

My Meal Plans - Organize and sort your meal plans in one place by naming and adding notes and tags to your plan for easy fugure reference.

Meal Plan Details - View your plan by day and meal, click to view all the recipes in that plan on one page, and easily add the plan to your calendar and autogenerate your shopping list.

How it Works - From you’re My Meal Plans page, click to add a new plan and then just select the days of the calendar with the items you’d like to save in a plan and add a name, description, and a few tags if you would like (they need to be in your plan calendar somewhere before saving the meal plan). You can save 8 weeks of meal plans or two months of meal plans (60 days total) for free or up to a year’s worth of plans (360 days) with Say Mmm Plus.

Posted by Brian

Grocery lists for Kraft recipes

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:35:00 -0400

Say Mmm makes it easy to save all your meal and recipe ideas from anywhere in one place and use them in meal plans and grocery lists. By adding grocery lists to ideas and recipes, you can save time and automatically generate a shopping list organized by area of the store with common pantry items separated out, and you can create a grocery lists from whole meal plans or by adding individual ideas and recipes to your list.

There are a lot of great recipe ideas out there on websites and blogs and in cookbooks, and Say Mmm helps you organize and use those ideas. A lot of our users save and use recipes from Kraft, so we thought it would be helpful to be able to find and use Kraft recipe ideas with Say Mmm grocery lists. So now users can search right from the home page through thousands of Kraft recipes and click to save them to their recipes or meal plans, and when they are added to shopping lists all the items they need to buy are organized for them. Then when cooking the meal, its easy to find the recipe again and click on the link to view all the details on the Kraft website.

Posted by Brian

Published Grocery Lists

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:33:04 -0400

Say Mmm has easy ways for bloggers to add a published shopping list to a recipe so readers can just click to print out what they need to get at a store, organized by area of the store. Items from multiple recipes can easily be combined or put into a full meal plan of recipes, like this grocery list on Home Ec 101.

Now we have added a way to create a published shopping list for any list, which has the additional advantage of being able to add in items that aren’t recipes. For example, in a meal plan there are often times that you might include side items, drinks, or simple things you wouldn’t need a recipe for. So now you can just add things like broccoli, French bread, wine, cheese sandwiches directly to the list and publish it. In addition to helping bloggers publish shopping lists for meal plans, anyone can use published lists to easily share their shopping list, and they can just send the link to anyone to view and print the list.

To publish a list, just click on the “Publish” link on the left hand area of any shopping list, and then get the link to add to a website or share via email on Facebook or Twitter or wherever.

Publishing the list:

Viewing the published list:

Posted by Brian

Japan Tsunami Relief

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 13:08:00 -0400

It has been a very sad week for Japan, with the terrible disasters and damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami followed by long, hard days of efforts to help survivors and of tense struggles with nuclear reactors. We have family in Japan, and luckily they are farther inland and were safe from the destruction along the coast. The silver lining of the tragedy has been in the perseverance of the Japanese in working together to help each other and in the outreach and caring of people around the world.

It isn’t always easy to know how to help out, so we wanted to share one of many inspiring ways people are reaching out to help. The information on these blogs is very helpful, and their creative way of empowering people to contribute through donations, prayers, and even just comments is impressive.

We have made our contributions to the American Red Cross.

Posted by Brian

Say Mmm on your phone

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:39:41 -0500

Check out the latest updates on the mobile site! It looks a lot better, and we have redone the navigation and look and feel of the pages to make the site cleaner and easier to use.

The Say Mmm mobile site is designed for smart phone browsers to be simple and fast, and uses web-based technologies to make it work more dynamically and feel more like an app. It works well for iPhones (or iPad/iPod touch), Android, Blackberries, and Palm phones and devices. You can bookmark the m.saymmm.com site in your browser, and even add a short cut to most phone desktops, so you can just click to get to the site, like you would for an app.

Here are some updated views of the plan and shop areas on the mobile site:

Plan – Plan your meals from your sofa, and remember what you are having for dinner from anywhere.
Shop – View and check off items on your grocery list while in the store, and add ideas to remember when you think of them.
Find – Take your recipes and restaurant ideas with you, and easily find newideas whenever you need them.

Posted by Brian

Sharing recipes with grocery lists publicly

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:53:15 -0500

Say Mmm makes it easy to save all your recipes and recipe links all in one place, and you can view them privately or share with select friends. With our publishing features, blogs and websites also create and manage a recipe index with grocery lists, so readers can easily find new ideas and just click to print the recipes or combine grocery items from multiple recipes into a single printable list. Readers don’t even need to log in and can do everything with just a few clicks.

Here are a couple of the larger collections of recipe indexes to check out at Home Ec 101, Organizing Junkie, and Heavenly Homemakers. And here is one of the latest ones from Mom’s Menu Planning.

We are also happy to announce that we now have a hosted recipe option feature for people that would like to publicly share a list of their favorite recipes and links, and they can add grocery lists or printable recipes for friends and family to use without having a Say Mmm account. All they have to do is send them a link.

Another nice thing is that the index is automatically updated as new published recipes are added to the account, and will show links for printable grocery lists and printable recipes based on whether that information has been added to the recipe. Here is an example of how it works for recipes from The Happy Housewife and from our web discoveries from different sites.

Grocery shopping for a large family

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:45:00 -0500

We found this series about grocery shopping by a group of bloggers with larger families, and we thought it was pretty cool that they shared their perspectives and tips on grocery shopping. If you have a large family, you may already know of some of the extra challenges of planning to buy larger quantities of food, stretching the budget even more with smarter shopping, taking an entourage of kids with you on adventures to the grocery store, and spending up to half a day getting things bought and organized. There are lots of good ideas for meal planning and grocery shopping that apply to any family. Here are the blogs to check out:

Carrie @ Our Full House

Christi @ Ants on a Farm

Elizabeth @ Yes They’re All Ours

Kathy @ Kathy Mom of Many

Kristy @ Homemaker’s Cottage

Lori @ Happy Busy Mama

Monica @ Natural Mama

Renee @ Bakers Dozen