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Have you ever come across a delicious recipe only to find out later on that it’s not 100% plant-based? Well, a new search engine has come to the rescue for this exact situation. Launched earlier this year, EatKind is an AI-powered tool that can convert pretty much any recipe or dish vegan by recommending the best plant-based alternatives.
EatKind is the newest AI-powered search engine that can veganise any recipe for its users. It caters to long-time herbivores who want to try out a new dish but have yet to find a fully plant-based version, or simply those who are just beginning to practice a flexitarian lifestyle. Once users plug in a recipe, the tool automatically returns a list of plant-based products to substitute any non-vegan items listed as ingredients.
‘Anybody can make any dish vegan’
The idea for EatKind emerged when founder Neetha Avalakki struggled with finding vegan alternatives for her favourite foods when she first made the plant-based transition. With her background in tech, Avalakki started building a platform to help those who are already vegan or considering going plant-based to veganise any dish they wanted.
And she didn’t want to just promote big-name brands, but support local startups who are also offering plant-based substitutes, or regionally-grown crops that can easily be incorporated to transform any existing non-vegan recipe into a completely animal-free one.
“Most people are only familiar with big dairy and meat alternative brands such as Oatly and Beyond,” the founder shares. “However, smaller, more local entrepreneurs in the plant-based foods industry have shown a lot of innovation in order to meet the growing consumer demand for more localized cuisines and tastes.”
“It was critical for EatKind to address this discovery problem to achieve our goal of making the planet vegan. And one way to do that was by providing a method for anybody to make any dish or meal vegan,” she continued.
Swapping out animal ingredients
Currently, EatKind operates as a website and offers users two main ways to find out new recipes or veganise one that they already have in mind. Users can plug in the dish they are interested in, such as a hot dog, for instance, and like most search engines, EatKind will return a whole list of hot dog recipes.
But then, EatKind allows you to simply click “Veganize Recipe” under each search result, converting any recipe into one that is vegan by substituting all non-vegan ingredients with a suitable alternative. Users can also plug in a specific recipe that they have chosen as well, by copy and pasting the URL into EatKind’s engine, which then churns out a vegan version for them.
Since its launch in June this year in the US and India, Avalakki says that EatKind has already “gotten a lot of attention”. She now plans to expand the platform, making it available in the UK, Europe, Canada and Australia and New Zealand, as well as build a mobile app and web plug-in to make its service even more convenient for users.
Vegan tech tools
With plant-based eating on the rise—a recent poll suggests as many as 4 in 10 consumers globally are now “part-time vegans”—more digital tools are now being developed to help make the vegan transition easier.
One tool, The Vegan Filter, is a browser extension compatible with a number of online retail platforms, which helps users filter out plant-based groceries, vegan fashion and cruelty-free beauty and cosmetics products when they shop.
Another, abillionveg, is a plant-based food review app that lets users around the world share their ratings and opinions of vegan products or dishes at restaurants. Launched by Vikas Garg, the Singapore-headquartered platform now boasts a user base of more than 130 countries globally.
Lead image courtesy of EatKind.
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