How an entrepreneur, who didn’t know how to cook, started a recipe company

Unless you are an avid food prepper, “what’s for dinner” is probably the phrase uttered everyday in most households.

Ten years ago, SideChef founder and CEO Kevin Yu set out to make it easier to answer that question by creating an all-in-one cooking, shopping and meal planning app. He later brought on Cadence Hardenbergh as co-founder and COO.

Recipe management itself not a new concept, and SideChef is among a group of startups bringing technology to a sector where handwritten recipes kept in a folder or Rolodex is the norm. We've seen companies like Galley Solutions and meez do it for restaurants, while Pestle, Whisk, Foody and even Instacart are creating apps for consumers.

However, SideChef’s “secret sauce,” if you will, is its more than 12,000 shoppable recipes that can be added to your cart and all of the ingredients needed to make that recipe are delivered or made available for in-store pickup from Walmart. There is also a “create your own” feature so that account holders can upload their own recipes and even share them publicly.

SideChef co-founders Cadence Hardenbergh and Kevin Yu. Image Credits: SideChef

The app is free to download and now has over 20,000 “smart recipes” that users can filter by dietary preferences, ingredients you already have in your kitchen, cuisine or cook time. There is a monthly subscription of $4.99 that comes with a premium version providing recipes from SideChef culinary experts.

Prior to starting the company, Yu was a video game developer for eight years, working with Warcraft and Blizzard. He admits that he didn’t know how to cook at the time, but was curious if there was a step-by-step guide via an app that helped people cook. When SideChef launched in 2014, it was named “Best App of the Year for Google Play.”