How to Develop A Food Recipe App: Cost, Features and Business Model
By: Sophia Martin
Tags: Mobile App Development, Apps, Mobile Apps, Technology, Startup

Are you a hotelier, restaurateur or a passionate cook who wants to share your best food recipes with the food lovers? Turn your well-thought recipes into a business by simply developing a food-recipe app like Tasty, Yummly, SideChef or BigOven.

Cooking is an art that comes from passion and allowing people to turn any ordinary meal into mesmerising and tempting food. Most people out there take this art as their hobby or a profession.

But with the fact that how people, especially foodies are turning towards mobile apps for searching a wide choice of food recipes, now is the time to take the momentum with the launch of your food cooking recipe app.

If you are still confused whether it will be worth developing a food recipe app like Tasty or Yummly, then you need to go through these market insights…

Here is the graph, portraying how frequently people have searched for recipes and how it is kept on rising.

“According to the survey, out of 400 crore people to their home worldwide during Covid-19 pandemic, 130 crores are in India. And with activities outside the home halted, it is found that Food recipe, Netflix, Health and Ludo are the most leisure-related topics during the peak time of lockdown.”

“Apart, a survey has discovered food recipe apps will enjoy the market size of 22,755,800 potential users from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Pakistan and Philippines have searched through a Facebook and shown interest in cooking.”

“The mobile app industry is soaring, like never before. As of 2019, the total mobile app revenue was $461.7 billion worldwide and projected to generate $935.2 billion in 2023, it is worth considering investing in mobile apps. Moreover, 1 out of each 4 is an iPhone/iPad user of the age of 18 and older, searched for cooking food recipes.”

Gone are those days when only moms used to look for a cookbook to try various cuisines at home. Several foodies are always high on cooking food by using recipe apps on a daily routine or asking google to find the best recipes for the meal.

You must be wondering, while there are so many food delivery applications available to satisfy your food craving, why would one look for the recipes and devote long hours to the preparation?

Well, the fact of the matter is, each recipe involves a whole gamut of ingredients, and when cooking something delectable to our taste palette, then it feels like a greater satisfaction.

There are various traditional cookbooks available that help you find the recipe or do some research online and all the recipes are laid out on Google, Youtube, Facebook and more. Now you can be an expert cook in no time!

But, users can do it far easy by simply installing an app to look for the recipes to cook for different occasions and purposes. Instead of going online to look for the recipes, businesses and mobile app development companies have come up with the excellent app idea that can answer all your questions in seconds.

Right from what should I cook to How should I cook, a recipe app can offer you all the solutions right away.

All thanks to technological advancement that helps people to try different things in a nutshell. People who do not know about cooking and ingredients at all, are cooking expertly.

With the growing boon of digitization in all business verticals, it makes sense to hire a mobile app development company to build a food recipe app like Tasty and Yummly.

However, whether you a startup, passionate cook or an entrepreneur, once you have decided to create a food recipe app, few of the questions will pop up in your mind as below:

What Type of Food Recipe App Can You Develop?

Who Can Earn From This Type Of Application?

Who Will Be The End Users of Recipe App?

What Features Can You Integrate Into a Food Recipe App?

How Can You Make Profit From a Cooking Recipe App?

How Much Does It Cost You To Launch An App?

Once you get the answer to these questions, you have a better idea about the scope of your future app will have in the market and accordingly plan to create a structure of your app. Before you dig deep to find the answer to these questions, it is worth to look over two leading food recipe apps like BigOven and Yummly providing over 350,000 to 1 million recipes to the users. Both of these apps have succeeded in attracting the attention of the users despite being altogether different from each other.

Though, it is crucial to realise that sticking to a single strategy will not help you win the game. So to become the next big hit of the market, you need to give a thought to different scenarios that make your product survive even in the tough competition. So, you must know an app development company that can understand your business goals and provide you with the solution that works best to meet the specific needs of the end-users.

So what’s the idea behind creating a food recipe app?

What Type of Recipe App Can You Develop in 2021 To Make Money?

With the availability of hundreds of cooking food recipe apps, how to make your app idea stand out in the crowd is the biggest challenge for you. So the main idea behind creating the app is to surprise your audience with something exclusive than to develop an app with standard features simply. So here are the few types of app that you can consider to develop:

No matter which app idea you choose to customize, make sure you have a home screen of the app that encourages users to get engaged with it for long hours. Like search bars on the homepage attract users to search for a broad choice of recipes, list the favourites and engage with the app as much as possible. If your app has a lack of content, then users will get bored and not be able to connect with your app.

So here are the few parameters that you can consider while hiring software developer for the project:

Advance level of App Functionality:

While customizing the structure of the app and defining the functionality of the app, make sure to keep in mind the device structure. This is where you need to consider the target audience and device structure also so that the users are able to access the functionality of your app to the fullest.

Multi-Purpose Apps:

Make sure your app is designed to solve the multi-purpose of the users, instead of just providing a bunch of recipes. This is what users expect from the app after downloading it. Thus, your cooking and food recipe app should have different modes to satisfy the needs of the users.

Food Cooking Mode:

People who love to cook, whether it be men or women, professional chefs or beginners- cooking mode is the essential app functionality that users expect from you. Right from exploring new cuisines to experimenting with fresh ingredients, make sure your app has everything to engage users for long hours.

Also, keep in mind to keep the interface simple and it needs to be supported by too many features. You can also choose to hire a software development company that ensures you high-quality content in the form of tutorials, video guides, photo instructions and other essential cooking tips that make the process easier for the users.

Grocery Shopping Mode:

Integrating ecommerce features to your app and allowing users to buy groceries from the listed stores, can be a worthy decision to entice more users to your app. And further, to enhance the functionality of the app, you can choose to incorporate the feature of providing on-demand food-ordering in an app.

Who Will Be Interested in Developing and Using This Type of App?

You have a brilliant app idea to startup the business, but the question is who can leverage this app idea and able to make money in 2021:

Here is such kind of people who can invest in the recipe app:

Professional Chefs

Health Coaches

Startups in the Food Industry

Passionate Cooks

Nutritionist

Hotelier/Restaurateur

But, who will be the potential customer of your application? By knowing your target audience you will be able to create a recipe app that actually helps meet the needs of the end-users. Apart from the foodies who love to browse food recipes on social media or other platforms?

Here are the few other categories of the audience that you can choose to target:

People living alone far away from their home

Medical Patients prescribed to be on a special diet

Fitness lovers who prefer to in-take a balanced diet

People are fond of exploring new cuisines and eating outside.

Amateurs in cooking

Travellers who always roam around cities to cities.

Beside every user has different cooking skills, experience and understanding, so make sure you describe each recipe with an easy to follow guide that is simple to execute. To avoid making it complicated, you can choose for android app development solutions that help you develop an app with all the necessary features.

What Are the Key Features to Create the Best Recipe Book App in the Market?

Features are the most important of your app development as it defines how your app will be taken in the market by the users. The choice of the features will also help you determine the cost to develop a food recipe app in 2021.

So here are the few necessary features that you need to integrate into your app:

User Features of Food Recipe App

Registration: The first thing users will look about your app is the registration process. You can hire mobile app developers to create a comfortable and smooth registration process for users to log in your application without any hassle. To make it far more comfortable, you can also provide the provision to integrate social logins and allow users to log in just with the social pages.

Profile Generation: Allow users to create a profile with the necessary information, including contact related info, their preferences and interest areas for the further recipe suggestions.

Meal Plan Out: By integrating this feature, you allow the app users to plan out the weekly meal in advance so that you don’t need to think about what to bake today.

Recipe List: Choosing from thousands of recipes is quite challenging for users. Therefore, categorize the list of recipes under various sections including healthy eating, salads, recipes for occasions, regular meal recipes and more.

Search and Advanced Search: This feature will help you engage users for long hours and encourage them to try recipes. Also, allow users to use filters to narrow down their searches by categories, occasions, methods, diets and more.

Nutritional Calculators: Nowadays, people are becoming more and more conscious of their health, so they prefer to watch out the calories and nutrients they take in. Make sure your food recipe app has this feature.

Save Recipe: Add an option to save their favourite recipes and access it from anywhere, anytime.

Print Recipe: Integrating this feature will help users to easily access the recipe in the printed form and avoid the inconvenience of holding a smartphone or bear the loss of the internet while cooking.

Personal Note: While watching the tutorial, allow users to add private notes for the special inputs for cooking any particular recipe.

Social Sharing: You can expand the reach of your recipe by allowing users to share their favourite recipe on social media. This will help garner more attention of users and engagement for your app.

Photo Sharing: Allow users to click a picture and share it in an app, to help others know how it will exactly look after cooking.

Review and Rating: Users can rate and review the recipe that they tried cooking. With this, they can give an idea to other app users about the performance of that recipe and how easily it is to execute. Implementing this feature to your app can be time consuming and complicated, therefore, you can choose to hire app developers to eliminate the complexity of the task.

Admin Features for Creating Cooking Mobile App

Manage Recipe and Subscription Packages: Recipes would be the heart of your food app, so allow admin to manage it seamlessly.

Manage User Profile: This feature allows the admin to view, manage and edit the profile of the users.

Manage Payments: The feature allows the admin to manage the payments done by the users for the app subscriptions, groceries, e-book purchase and more.

View Earnings: With the analytics, you can determine how much your app is earning in a month.

View Ratings and Reviews: Admin can view and manage the reviews and ratings given by the users and also their details.

Manage Community: Admin can manage the community where the app users connect. Admin has the facility to view, hide or delete the question and answer if they find across anything inappropriate.

Content Management: Content is the king of your app, so admin is responsible to manage the content published in an app and make sure to continuously update and review it.

Notifications: An option to send a push notification or alerts to the app users related to the offers, coupons, new additions and features in the food recipe mobile app.

So now you have all the details about who can earn from this app, who will be your end-users and what features and functionalities are required to create a food recipe app. But many of you are wondering, what all this makes sense if it is not earning you anything.

Best App Monetization Methods for the Food App

How to make a profit from your app is one of the most frequently asked questions by the app developers. No matter how brilliant the app development company you have deployed to the project, it is ultimately a waste if your app is not earning any money.

So how can you make money from the food recipe app?

These are the few app monetization strategies leveraged by thousands of apps in the app store and play store. So let’s begin with it:

User Subscription: You provide additional features to the users opted for monthly subscriptions like ad-free recipes, diet oriented recipes and more. Your mobile app offers subscriptions for a certain period.

In-app Adds: This is one of the traditional ways to earn money from the apps. The advertisement has become the most powerful tool for the digital market and using this tool to your recipe app will help you earn money. But make sure to advertise your product and service-related ads. If a user clicks or interacts with an ad, then you will get money.

Freemium: To monetise from this strategy, you need to have a second paid version of your app. If users like a free version of your app, then they will probably download the paid app version that has extra features.

Ok, now all set! You have an idea about how to make money from your app. But the only question left is how much it cost to develop a food recipe app in 2021?

Well, there is no straightforward answer to this question, thus let’s find what factors are influencing the final cost of developing a food recipe app…

How Much Does It Cost To Launch A Recipe App in 2021?

While there is no standard cost of developing a food recipe app, but all such features there is a cost attached to it. To create a food recipe app like Yummly, it would cost you around $5000+ depending upon various factors your cost could vary. Factors ranging from designing an application, features, sizes and the platform of the app are the most critical aspects that drive the final cost of the app development.

As you choose to add more and more features and complexity to your app, it is going to be a higher price. App platforms also impact the prices of the application, and developing an iOS application is comparatively more expensive than Android.

In addition, the development cost of the application also varies according to the location of the developers and their skills and expertise.

Make sure you have the best app development team that comprises of:

Project Analyst and manager

Front-end and Backend developer

UX/UI Designer

Quality Assurance

Marketing Team

All-in-all, with the average per hour cost of the developer about $50, it will cost around $5000 to $10,000+ to create an app like Yummply, BigOver, Tasty and more. Further, it can be either higher or lower, depending upon the specific needs of your business.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, developing a recipe app has become a new trend especially in 2020 and expected more and more foodies are kept embracing a different way of cooking food.

So with the changing psychology of the people and their eating habits, developing your own cooking and recipe book app will be a great idea for startups. Hopefully, with this blog, you have a concept and all the information with you as to how to stand out in the market with your app.

But to make your application a great success in the market, you need to choose to partner with a skilled software development company that can turn your idea into a perfect solution. Also, you can leave a comment below if you have any doubts or query!

https://www.twitter.com/FlutterComm