by Risha Jindal
An educational platform aimed to inspire students in the kitchen while reducing food wastage through encouraging the usage of leftovers
Digimeal began in 2014 after winning a competition for young tech entrepreneurs called the iDEA award sponsored by HRH The Duke of York and Will.I.Am.
The basic idea with Digimeal is that the user (typically a student) can input three ingredients into the app and it will generate a recipe for you using those ingredients as the core. The app aims to inspire young people in the kitchen by providing them with easy recipes to give them ideas on how to use food effectively and store food to reduce the amount wasted by the individual.
We have currently developed the app to a stage where it is downloadable on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store on Android. However, we do not have enough funding to allow our idea to scale to its full potential.
If we succeed in our fund raising, we will use the money to firstly, continue our app development to make the app more interactive that it is in its current stage. We would like to do this in order to engage our users more and create a stickiness to the app that ensures a frequent consumption of the app.
Secondly, we would use the money to generate more content for the app. This would include expanding our recipe database that is currently limited and also include more content on the app around skills and tips in the kitchen and for cooking. We would use the money to approach knowledgable people within this field to share this content with us.
Lastly, we would use the funding to help promote the app in order to scale through downloads. We would use the money to run events within universities to promote our brand and the app, conduct demos of students using the app and create posters and billboards to promote the app in university canteens etc.
Once our product is successfully funded, we raise the issue of being able to maintain downloads and increase them. Funding would be used to advance the app to our desired stage and increase promotion and content of the app, to ensure this buzz, we intend to visit universities across the UK to use the old fashion method of word of mouth to encourage downloads.
We also have the issue of being able to run the app if it was to scale, in which case, we would have to pass on and sell the app to a much better operator that could showcase the app better than ourselves.