Behind the scenes
How we taught AI to actually read a recipe
Parsing a recipe sounds simple. Doing it reliably across thousands of messy formats is the hard, interesting part.
A recipe is messier than it looks
“2 Tbsp butter” is easy. But recipes hide quantities in prose, split steps across paragraphs, bury the yield in a headnote, and assume context a human just knows. Teaching software to understand all of that took real work.
Structure first, then judgement
We combine layout understanding with language models so Kitchin knows the difference between an ingredient, an instruction, and a story about someone's trip to Italy. Then it normalises units, infers servings, and estimates nutrition.
It's not perfect — and that's why every card stays fully editable. But it's right often enough to feel like a little kitchen magic.