In February 2021, the heart of our food platform — our app — celebrated its 7th anniversary. After being founded in 2013, we launched the Apple App Store a year later. 100 recipes were available. This was to be followed by numerous best of and design awards and an office visit by Tim Cook himself. More than 4 million people now actively use our cooking platform every month.
It is time to review the past few years and take a look at the milestones. And who could do that better than ours Chief Technology Officer, Fabian Lucas, who has contributed significantly to the development and success of the app since its launch in 2014.
“When I joined Kitchen Stories in 2014, there was already a great iPad app in German and English with 100 recipes, some of which were available for purchase. With an extremely small team, we launched the iPhone app in summer, expanded to 12 languages and dropped the payment barrier in order to fully focus on growth. I am particularly proud of the RED campaign with Apple at the end of the year, which came to us shortly after the first 1 million downloads has brought.”
“The year 2015 at Kitchen Stories was marked by platform scaling. This year, we not only grew on the user side and launched the community, but we also developed new platforms, such as an innovative app for the Apple Watch and for the Apple TV, both of which were fresh on the market back then - and of course we launched our Android app and thus conquered new markets. We were rewarded with the awards “Best of Google Play 2015” and “Apple Best of 2015” - How could that be topped?”
“An international cooking platform requires a stable backend system. We invested heavily this year and built up the team accordingly. Because by now, we had broken the 10 million download mark. There were also exciting new community features, which enabled more user interaction. We also started to create our webpage because we had noticed that there was enormous potential on the web, where users search for cooking inspiration on Google every day.”
“If one year in the history of Kitchen Stories is memorable, it is certainly 2017. We started with a redesign of the platform, particularly our “Feed” homepage in the mobile apps. The absolute “blast” followed in February: Tim Cook, the Apple boss, visited us at our offices in Kreuzberg and took the time to get to know Kitchen Stories in person. But that wasn't all, on top of that, there was the “Apple Design Award” in summer, the highest award for apps in the Apple universe!”
“In addition to the exciting years of growth, there are also always the technically exciting years, because there have always been major challenges in the “substructure” of Kitchen Stories. In 2018 in particular, we worked intensively on our data structure, i.e. the way we structure and store recipes — with the aim of making it easier for our employees to enter recipes and translate them through intelligent, consistent and international ingredient lists. This work also made our new “Recipe API” product, With which we can make our data and content available to other companies via an interface.”
“There were two important milestones in 2019: We have our Platform opened and allows our users to enter recipes. In every detail of this feature, we want to make it easy for users to provide similar quality to Kitchen Stories recipes. A unique selling point (but also a technical challenge) was that users could upload their own videos. The second major milestone was the redesign or Relaunch of the platform with new logos, app icons and fonts. “Dark Mode,” i.e. a dark look for Kitchen Stories on smartphones and tablets, was also completely new, which we immediately considered.”
“We haven't even talked about our business model yet. Here, we rely heavily on the cooperation and integration of brands and companies that want to position themselves on our platform. More about this in 2021: In summer 2020, we launched our first B2C premium feature as a test balloon. This means users can become and receive premium subscribers in the app an additional feature: cookbook+. With cookbook+, you can collect and organize recipes from all sources, including from other sites on the Internet, in Kitchen Stories cookbooks. All recipes in one place, so to speak.”
“Back to our B2B solutions: For several years now, we have been offering our partners exciting options for integration into our “Product Kitchen Stories,” such as twin, Nutella, Disney+ or the premium kitchen manufacturer next125. In 2021, we would like to significantly develop here too and, in addition to the existing B2B products, find exciting, new ways for brands and companies to advertise natively and to target groups in our app and on our website.”
*Fabian Lucas, Chief Technology Officer, left Kitchen Stories at his own request in summer 2021 to pursue new professional challenges. After 7 years of working together, with ups and downs, it is difficult to put into words how much we will miss working with him. Thank you for all your hard work, dedication, and passion.
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