BBC Good Food ingredient swaps

Project overview

Good Food Ingredient Swaps is a simple AI-powered app feature that lets users customise any recipe to meet their requirements. Our app features thousands of chef-tested recipes but users with special dietary requirements can only enjoy a fraction of them. Many of the recipes can easily be adapted by swapping an ingredient or two but less experienced cooks don't always know what a suitable substitue is. This is where Ingredient Swaps come in.

My role

This feature was rapidly designed and built in two days during Immediate's AI hackathon and became the company's first and only client-facing AI feature. I led the project and collaborated with a React Native developer.

Why ingredient swaps?

There are millions of people in the UK who avoid specific ingredients.

And 100% have something they don't like, are not in the mood for or don't have on hand.

Discovery and research

Qualitative insights

Swapping ingredients in a recurring theme in customer feedback. Below are some examples of what I heard our users say in interviews and during usability testing sessions:

'If you are a proper cook you'd know [what to substitute for an ingredient]. But people like me don't know of things that can be substituted. I think substitutions are really useful.'

'I spend so long going into every recipe, in and out, in and out, [to check ingredients for allergens] it's the most annoying thing when searching for a recipe and I get so disheartened with the amount of effort it takes searching that I often give up.'

'It doesn't indicate that you can tweak it to make it vegetarian, it doesn't look very customisable.'

Quantitative data

Recent survey with 100 current and prospective users also showed a high demand for this functionality. Majority of the users agreed that it is very important that the recipe can be adapted to individual needs and preferences, with almost 90% of them rating it as ‘important’ or ‘very important’. None of the users rated it as ‘not important at all’.​ Out of all suggested personalisation features, the ability to customise a recipe was perceived as the most valuable and out of all possible recipe adaptation features, the ability to swap ingredients was rated as the most useful.

How did we support users with special dietary requirements before?

We have a lot of helpful articles but they are:

• Not searchable in the app
• Not easily discoverable
• Separate to recipes so not on hand when needed the most (while cooking or choosing a recipe)

Use cases

This feature can be used to:

• swap an expensive ingredient (e.g. shallots -> onions)
• swap ingredients containing common allergens (e.g. dairy cream -> coconut milk)
• swap hard to get ingredients for more widely available ones (tamarind -> soy sauce)
• make a dish vegetarian or vegan (chicken -> tofu)

How ingredient swaps work

1. Open any recipe
2. Scroll to ingredients list
3. Tap 'Customise'
4. Select your dietary preferences
5. Get swaps suggestions

How we built it

• UI was built using existing components from our pattern library.
• Ingredients are sent to OpenAI with a prompt.
• A schema is used to ensure the response is structured and consistent.