Inside Anchovy: Lincoln woman creates recipe-sharing app to make cooking easier
Join a 'Food Social Network'
Join a 'Food Social Network'
Join a 'Food Social Network'
She moves through the kitchen with purpose, and she wants others to do the same. Diane Temme Stinton held her 18-month-old on her hip as she cooked with her mother, frying up Hiroko Temme’s Japanese dumpling recipe. The three generations are in the kitchen often, and after months of work and research, the Lincoln woman said cooking for the family is so much easier.
"I came up with the app when I had Charlotte. I was thinking about balancing my work and my life and, 'Why is this so hard?'" Stinton said.
Stinton and her team just developed and launched a recipe, meal-planning and food social media app called Anchovy.
Stinton lives in Lincoln with her husband and two daughters, and she’s the CEO of TMCO Manufacturing, a company founded by her father. She enjoys cooking and thought there was an app out there to help her get organized. When she couldn’t find what she needed, the entrepreneur assembled a team to create one.
"I just wanted to create tools for busy people to bring the fun back into the kitchen because I actually love to cook. But I stopped loving it when it just became too hard," she said.
She said the app allows her to easily share a recipe’s grocery list with her husband so that he can pick up supplies.
The Anchovy app allows users to photograph recipes or upload a recipe link. It then uses artificial intelligence to organize the recipe, break down the ingredient list and load it into a digital recipe file. From there, the user can create a grocery list, meal plan, and share the recipe and photos with friends and family.
While recipes are loading, the app shares fish-themed, light-hearted Dad jokes playing off the Anchovy name.
Stinton’s goal: "To become the first worldwide food social network. We talked about connections. Bringing the world closer together," she said.
Emily Smith is a foodie, and the 23-year-old is part of the team launching the app, which she said she uses almost daily. As a young adult, fresh out of college, Smith said that cooking has become a social event, sharing photos and recipes with her friends. She loves creating interesting rice bowls with new kinds of sauces.
"Every night, you can post-- 'hey, what are you cooking for dinner?'" she said. Smith loves the feature that lets her snap a photo of any recipe and it uploads to the app, including handwritten recipes from her grandmother which are smeared or difficult to read.
Smith showed off the new social feed on the app, which allows her to snap photos of her culinary creations and share them with friends, along with recipe links.
Smith’s mother, Beth, is using the app to upload old family recipes and share them quickly with her daughters. She said her recipe collection prior to the app was a mess.
"I have my mom’s cookbooks, my grandmother’s recipes and I never use them because it’s so disorganized," Beth said.
Beth said she has numerous cookbooks where just four or 5 recipes are her favorites. The app gives her a way to preserve those and keep them handy on her phone.
The Anchovy app is free but you can upgrade to the premium version to get unlimited recipe storage, meal plan shuffles and the ability to search all your friends' recipes. Premium costs $1.99 for three months, or a year for $23.99. Stinton said the technology in the app exists to create family cookbooks, recipe showers, endless ways to share family traditions and new trends.
“Food nourishes the body, but it nourishes your soul. And it’s a part of you and it brings community together. It brings people together, and it’s really at the core of who we are, too,” Stinton said.