Not just recipes: from the ingredient to the big picture

Any app can store recipes. The hard part comes afterwards: what are you cooking on Wednesday? What goes on the shopping list for it? mangia turns your recipes into one continuous path — drag and drop into the weekly plan, an automatically sorted shopping list out of that (the same ingredients grouped together), and while you cook, cooking mode walks you through step by step. But that's only the surface. What really sets mangia apart from a recipe list lies a layer deeper — at the ingredients.

To most apps a recipe is just a block of text. To mangia, every ingredient is a recognised unit. Three things happen automatically the moment a recipe comes in:

• Tidying up. “½ tsp finely chopped red onion” becomes “onion”. Amounts, cutting notes and flourishes fall away.
• Translating. “Scallion”, “spring onion” and “green onion” are all the same thing — no matter what you or the recipe source call it.
• Sorting. Every ingredient gets its place: vegetable, legume, grain, animal or plant. “Spaghetti” and “penne” both land under “grain”, not as two different things.

It sounds unremarkable, but it's the foundation for everything that follows. Only because mangia recognises ingredients instead of just storing them can it count honestly, draw a balance and learn what you enjoy. Without that step, every number afterwards would be guesswork.

From the recognised ingredients an overview of your week comes together on the side — no diary, no calorie counting. You see how many different plants were involved, what's in season right now, and how often meat, dairy and plant-based food made it to the table.

Why plant variety in particular? In your gut lives a huge community of bacteria, and it feeds on different plant fibres. A large study (the American Gut Project) found that people who eat 30 different plants a week have a noticeably more diverse gut microbiome than those who stop at ten — and that diversity is considered one of the best markers of healthy digestion. So it's not about “lots of vegetables”, it's about variety. That's exactly what's hard to keep track of in everyday life — and exactly what mangia counts for you. “12 plants — already a good third of the way to 30” tells you more than any calorie figure. And the number only holds up because the ingredient recognition behind it counts “spaghetti” and “penne” as one grain.

With kids, it's not the recipe that counts but the ingredient. “Lina doesn't like the casserole” doesn't help you much — “Lina doesn't like onions but loves pasta” helps a lot. That's exactly where mangia breaks the feedback down: after the meal you quickly tap what was a hit, what was only tried and what got turned down. And because mangia knows the ingredients behind it — the same recognition as in the tally — it learns at the ingredient level instead of just per dish. Over time a taste profile builds up per child: suggestions take into account what goes down well, and you can see which new ingredient you're gently working towards. Less “ew, what's that”, more food that actually gets eaten.

Variety, season, taste, kids' preferences — all of it feeds into the “Recommended” sorting of your recipes. It pushes to the top what fits right now, and learns from what's happening anyway: what you like while browsing, what lands in the plan, what gets ticked off on the shopping list. Fresh preferences count more than old ones, and as long as mangia barely knows you, it deliberately holds back. Important: it stays a suggestion, not a rule — “Recommended” is just one of several sortings, and “Taste learning” can be switched off in the settings at any time.

mangia is ad-free — and stays that way. What you cook, plan and shop for belongs to you: it isn't sold, isn't mined for advertising and isn't used to train models. The overview is there for you, not for us — and you decide how much mangia gets to learn.