Quarantine Cravings

Quarantine Cravings started in the middle of the pandemic, with Raisa Talwar. We developed a range of easy-to-prepare baking mixes so families stuck at home could still make the treats they missed.

Getting there took extensive recipe testing: every mix went through repeated rounds at home until it worked reliably in an ordinary kitchen, with ordinary equipment, in the hands of someone who does not bake often. I built the website to promote the products and to give quarantined families somewhere to discover and share recipes.

The mixes were a moment. The recipes stayed — the site is still where the tested versions live, across cakes, cookies, breakfast and a gluten-free range.

The app includes a feature that scans a product's ingredient label and flags potential allergens and ingredients of concern — nuts and gluten-containing ingredients among them — returning a plain verdict rather than a wall of small print.

This came from my own experience. I have a severe nut allergy and my mother has celiac disease, which made me acutely aware of how difficult it can be to work out whether a packaged food is safe to eat. Ingredient lists are long, inconsistently worded, and often printed too small to read in a shop aisle.

NutriScan turns that into a barcode scan: an allergy verdict tuned to the person using it, plus a health read at a glance — Nutri-Score, processing level, sugar and salt. It runs on Open Food Facts data covering over three million products, and users can photograph missing products to add them back to the open database.