Manna Cooking

Manna uniquely empowers people to customize their recipes and cooking experiences. Our proprietary technology allows users to discover, collect, create, edit, organize and share recipes. Manna is a home to build community around food.

Have you ever used a recipe from the Internet?   

Sure. Is it littered with ads while you endlessly scroll to the recipe? Also yes. Say you finally find the chicken parm recipe you want. Now what? You have to print it, take a screenshot or save it to a random notes app. Scattered and tedious.

Then you're then forced to toggle between ingredients and directions while you’re cooking, making the entire kitchen experience unnecessarily disjointed. Plus – all the recipes on the internet are formatted differently, so there’s no consistency. And after all that, you end up deviating from the recipe anyway, but have no way to customize it if you want to cook that recipe again. None of the power actually goes to the user.

You’re probably thinking that there must be a better way to do this! There should be one place where you can find, use, customize and save recipes. Food and cooking are universal to all humans. Now there is – enter Manna.

There’s nothing out there that meets all your needs in the kitchen. Until now. 

Everyone is ordering groceries and cooking at home.

The global market for food apps is massive and since the onset of COVID-19, growing exponentially. People are stuck in their homes, dependent on a mixture of home-cooking and delivery. In 2016, Businesswire projected a $250 billion global food app market by 2022. Recent forecasts from Morgan Stanley now suggest as high as a $470 billion dollar market by 2025 for the delivery portion of the food app sector alone. Similarly, Coresight Research polls show over 52% of respondents ordered groceries online in the past 12 months, with a huge spike in demand since COVID 19, and projected 40% year on year growth for online grocery delivery in 2020.

Yet despite this massive spike in demand for eating at home, the app options for the home-cook are lacking due to a rift in the market. A gap that Manna fills.

Here’s the problem: On one side of the market you have content publishers. Known and trusted brands that reliably make delicious recipes. There’s inspiration points, but no functionality to actually help you in the kitchen, form communities, customize, or share what you made. Their apps are designed with the incentive of users cooking their recipes in exchange for consuming ads. That’s the end of the relationship.

On the other side you have recipe utility apps. They offer a database of recipes and some organizational tools. But again, there’s no way to share and form communities, and no room for self expression. Plus if you still want your favorite recipes from the web, you need a minimum of 2 apps on your phone.

Manna lands right in the middle. It’s one universal platform that gives you the tools to make the recipes you already like, customize them, find new recipes, cook them, and share them. And coming soon we’ll also give users the power to seamlessly create meal plans from their cookbooks, and automatically create grocery shopping lists, getting ingredients right to your door in one click. Manna is and will continue to become the universal destination for all parts of the home cooking experience. The only food app you’ll ever need.

How will Manna make money?

So what does Manna actually do?

Well, a lot of things…

Manna Scanner: Copy recipe URLs and paste them into the Manna Scanner, which pulls only the relevant ingredients, amounts and directions to create a formatted recipe in seconds within the app. No more ads, no more printing.

Recipe Editor: Create, edit, modify and customize any recipes. Replace ingredients, serving amounts and directions. All recipes render in a uniform format.

Cooking GPS: Follow cooking directions with the Cooking GPS. Receive step by step directions paired with relevant directions, ingredients, and amounts paired with each step. No more ads, no more scrolling back and forth.

Cookbook: Once you’re done cooking, save and organize your recipes in your own personal cookbook. Save other people’s recipes, too.

Swipe Mode: Swipe on recipe cards. Swipe right if you like it, swipe left if it’s not for you and swipe up to add any recipe directly to your cookbook. (Think Tinder, but for food).

Social Feed: Discover recipes directly in your feed, copy them, customize them, add them to your cookbook. Post photos and engage with other Manna users.

Our current audience and engagement metrics. 

How we'll grow our user base and scale the app. 

In just under 18 months, we’ve turned an idea into an app, a brand and a business. All for around $100,000 dollars total. We were meticulous in building out each portion of Manna, always looking toward the future and with the user in mind. We identified every pain point we could think of in the home cooking experience, and worked one by one to solve them with our technology. Manna is intended, above all, to be useful and universal.

The business is run by young and seasoned entrepreneurs. 

We focused on a brand that was fun, easy on the eyes, non-judgemental, and steeped in self-expression. Cooking and eating are personal experiences, and we believe everyone should be free to cook how they want to cook, eat what they want to eat, and have some help and inspiration along the way. On top of that, we ensured that our look and feel was top notch, partnering with Graj and Gustavsen long before we ever had an app.

We built an app from scratch, writing every single line of code in house. Manna was constantly iterating and improving thanks to help of our alpha and closed beta testers, before launching on the App Store and on Wefunder.

We built a team of all-star advisors. Manna’s ambitious goal to become the universal food app is our north star. We know that the path there is long, complex, and difficult so we built a team of: serial entrepreneurs, former food executives, chefs and restaurateurs, marketing experts, e-commerce experts, and fellow startup founders to make sure we have strategic guidance and resources to build out every avenue.

Investing in Manna means...

The app we want to build in the future 

The next steps for Manna are focused on user acquisition, improving our technology, and developing the remaining in-app features like meal planning, one-click grocery shopping, and social groups and events.

Since we are a platform that is both funded and driven by our community, growing that community is our paramount priority. Paid ads in the Facebook and Google marketplaces are a necessary part of this growth, but our primary focus is on organic growth through unique partnerships with influencers, restaurants, and food brands/products. We’ve already begun activating some of these partnerships on a small scale through our social media channels and in-app social feed, yielding a 40% active user growth in our first month on Wefunder. Many bigger partnerships are already in place for the near future.

We believe in growth by adding value to people’s actual lives. Ultimately our goal is to foster an active community of home-cooks who joined Manna because they found it fun, unique, and useful in their daily lives.

The Co-Founders 

Josh Abady (COO) | Guy Greenstein (CTO) | Rachel Abady (CMO)

Investing in Manna means investing in a team of young entrepreneurs who are dedicated to creating a unique and powerful tool that connects kitchens around the world.

We’re really proud of what we’ve built so far, but Manna can be so much more. We'll hire developers to improve the user experience, build partnerships, and launch marketing campaigns to tell the world about Manna. Join us!

– The Manna Team

Download the app

LINK TO DOWNLOAD: https://bit.ly/mannacooking