Reeset.Earth Ltd | Free
- Recipe app with an environmental focus
- Recipes and ingredients graded on ‘Carbon Calories’
- Impressive food database but some glitches
Reewild is a green-tinted shopping app that seeks to keep you informed on the environmental impact of the food that you eat.
It basically rolls the function of a basic meal planner, a recipe finder, and a shopping list into one all-encompassing app. Underpinning it all is the focus on tracking your food’s carbon cost.
Recipes are graded on ‘Carbon Calories’
Featured celebrity chefs will supply their recipes with the app’s signature Carbon Calories certification. This grants every recipe a standard A to E grade, with an A grade meaning a very low impact and an E grade meaning very high impact.
There’s a neat breakdown of the required ingredients here, along with a full costing. This plays into the app’s tie-in with established retailers, which in turn leads to the shopping list function.
Add ingredients to a Shopping List
Tap to create a shopping list from within a recipe, and you’ll be provided with a rundown of the ingredients from a selection of local online grocery services and stores. It’s a very slick operation, though in my experience the AI-matched ingredients process can be rather hit and miss.
It mostly assembles the correct ingredients, but I noticed a pronounced problem picking out certain ingredients – swapping pressed ginger juice in for plain old garlic, for example. It works great right up until it doesn’t, though it’s at least simple enough to swap out ingredients manually.
The AI assistant isn’t perfect
Talking of AI, there’s also an AI-driven meal planner that guides you through three quick steps in order to assemble a complete meal plan for up to a week. After inserting your preferences (cooking times, cuisine type, diet type) and quantities, the app will provide a pithy description for the AI tool to follow. You can then amend the text with any extra requests.
Or at least, that’s the idea. In practice, I encountered a persistent bug that would freeze up the app whenever the keyboard was summoned, necessitating an app restart. As with so many areas of AI these days, the promise of its usefulness seems to exceed the reality at present.
Assemble meal plans for the week with a little AI help
As things stand, Reewild shouldn’t be used as a pure recipe app. Where its handy carbon gradation system comes into its own is with simply tracking the environmental impact of ingredients and popular recipes. The developer has gone to considerable lengths to assemble a database of popular products from various retailers, and it uses this to highlight low-impact recipes.
In short, Reewild serves as brilliant inspiration for anyone who’s interested in food yet wary of its environmental impact. It’s just not quite ready to be your only or even main food app right now.