Interview with Angelina Kraushaar
Founder of Cook&Eat®
“Cooking one recipe at a time fits less and less into our busy everyday lives, where free time is short even without cooking.”
- 01
How did Cook&Eat® start?
I believe homemade food has a special value for many people. When you cook yourself, you decide on the ingredients, the quality, the taste and what ends up on the table. At the same time, cooking one recipe at a time fits less and less into our busy everyday lives, where free time is short even without cooking.
- 02
Where do you see the real problem?
If you want to eat varied, homemade food, you often have to accept a lot of planning, shopping and cooking. When I want to cook spontaneously, I often don’t have the right ingredients in the fridge. Of course you can quickly make pasta – but for me that’s not a solution for every day if I want to eat varied and balanced meals. It’s exactly these many small things that make everyday cooking so demanding: deciding what to cook, finding suitable dishes, planning quantities, shopping and then preparing every dish separately.
- 03
But that’s what take-away and convenience food are for.
Exactly. These options solve part of the problem very successfully: they save time. But in return we give up part of the control over what we eat and how our meals are prepared. For me, that’s a clear trade-off between cooking yourself and saving time.
- 04
And that’s the conflict Cook&Eat® is meant to solve?
Yes. Cook&Eat® resolves the trade-off between cooking yourself and saving time. We’re not just trying to get people to cook single recipes faster. We’re changing the way the entire cooking process is planned.
- 05
How does it work in practice?
Our 2-dish plans prepare a complete cooking session. The menu, shopping, quantities, kitchen tools, order and timing are already planned. Users are guided step by step through a coordinated cooking process and prepare two different meals in one cooking session.
- 06
What makes Cook&Eat® different from meal prep or classic recipe platforms?
The core of Cook&Eat® isn’t the single recipe, but the workflow between several dishes. In classic cooking, recipes are looked at one after another. Classic meal prep often produces the same meal several times. Cook&Eat®, by contrast, coordinates the steps of two different dishes with each other.
- 07
Who is it especially interesting for?
For people who generally like to eat homemade food but aren’t willing or able to spend a lot of time on planning and cooking every day. At the same time, the clearly structured steps can help people with little cooking experience, because decisions, order and timing are already prepared. This makes the cooking process easier to follow and more likely to succeed.
- 08
Where does Cook&Eat® stand today?
We have left the concept phase and are working with real product prototypes. The first cooking processes have been tested in practice, and 2-dish plans were developed from them. The first cooking plan already exists as a designed product. In parallel, MVP Lite is becoming the first digital platform where the concept and the products can be tested.
- 09
What is the next decisive step?
Validation. These insights will form the basis for the next stage of development of Cook&Eat®.
- 10
What is your long-term vision?
Cook&Eat® should become an alternative between classic cooking and convenience: a way to put homemade, varied meals on the table even in a busy everyday life, without a lot of effort.