Use Your Foodle is a recipe site which aims to reduce household food waste.  How often have you bought an item for a recipe only to throw it out a few days later after not using all of it?  For the average U.S. household of four, food waste translates into an estimated $1,350.00 to $2,275.00 in annual losses. After cleaning out the fridge weekly only to discover forgotten food items, it was time to do something about it.  The site, which is still under heavy development, aims to take inventory of your household food items and help you make the most of them.

Current features include:

• Add and save recipes
• Fork recipes – Maybe you’ve made Mrs X’s Favorite Apple Pie, but changed a few of the ingredients.  You can now save the recipe with those changes and make it your own.  Forking automatically imports all the data from the recipe and allows you to change the ingredients, and then save the new recipe.
• Find recipes based on used ingredients – Directly from the recipe page you can click on any ingredient and find other recipes that use that same ingredient.  Explore recipes and try to use all your ingredients.
• Follow users – Following your favorite users and see what they are making!
• Your personal pantry – Once you make a recipe we’ll save all the ingredients you used to your pantry.  This is a list of food items that you currently have, or have recently used.

Under Development features include:

• Fork tree – See all the changes that have been made to a recipe.  No longer will you have to search the comments to find how people augmented the original recipe.  We’ll show you how people have changed the original recipe in an organized manner.  Also, if someone makes a fork to a forked recipe we’ll show you that as well!  Share recipes, share changes and improve your cooking!
• Personal pantry upgrades – The ultimate goal is to help you control your food inventory from one place.  Once you make a recipe we want you to know how much of each ingredient is left over and when it will expire.

We want to help you use all of your food and eliminate household food waste.  We believe that starts will everyone knowing exactly what they have in their fridge and cupboards.  You can currently add all your pantry items to our system, but we know this can be a time consuming and painful process.  By adding recipes, and making those recipes, we can build your pantry over time.  If you want to make a recipe, we want to be able to tell you if you have everything you need or what you might need to purchase.  You will be able to get email updates about a food item that is about to expire, or when you are running low on flour.  Never again clean out your fridge to find forgotten about produce in a drawer, find moldy cheese, or see that your frozen food items have expired or been freezer burned.

Again, this site is still under heavily development.  Feel free to give it a try.  It is currently being hosted on Heroku, and so the load time may be significantly longer than typical page loads.  If you have any questions or comments please direct them to admin@chrisbarthol.com.