Our Story

We're a family that eats together.

We're Dutch, Japanese, and American. A multilingual household in California where dinner is the best part of the day. Ask our oldest how his day was and he won't tell you about school. He'll list every meal he had and rate his day accordingly.

Nothing out there fit our family, so we built it.

Our oldest has severe food allergies, and he wanted to learn to cook, and to code (or so I thought; more on that later). We tried every recipe app out there. None of them felt right. Most were clunky first-generation mobile apps, and the few that took allergies and dietary restrictions seriously were expensive and still got it wrong. Flagging peanuts but missing the sesame hidden in a sauce, or labelling something "dairy-free" when it clearly wasn't. We wanted an app that just works, and actually understands its users.

Our middle son is on the spectrum and has a long list of textures and ingredients he avoids. Our youngest is a typical six-year-old with strong opinions about anything green. And the two of us? We love food from everywhere. Thai curries, Japanese home cooking, Dutch stamppot, California taco trucks. We needed one app that works for all five of us.

Our bookshelf told us the rest.

It's packed with Dutch, Japanese, and English cookbooks, and we don't speak each other's native languages. Half the recipes on our shelf were out of reach. We needed an app that could translate any recipe, instantly, so everyone can cook from any book in the house.

And we stopped trusting the numbers.

Along the way we noticed something that bothered us: the nutrition facts on recipe websites and in most other apps simply don't add up. They're estimates layered on estimates, sometimes just an AI's guess, and when your family's health depends on what's actually in the food, a guess isn't good enough. So we did it the hard way: KiWi matches every ingredient against official government food databases and shows you exactly where every number comes from. If a number is on the screen, you can tap it and see the source. That's the standard we wanted for our own family, so it's the standard you get too.

We may have gone a little overboard.

The plan was that my oldest and I would build KiWi together. His enthusiasm for writing code lasted about three days (exactly as long as you'd expect from an eleven-year-old), and who could blame him, when all his dad could talk about was things like "Jaccard token similarity, Zipfian distribution, Fisher-Yates shuffle, Levenshtein distance, Haversine distance, and finite-state lookahead constraints for morphological false-positive prevention."

But we never lost sight of what actually matters: a product that just works. For shopping, for planning the week, for finding and saving recipes. And most of all, for knowing what is really in your food, so that you can make the right choices for yourself and your family, with numbers you can trust.

And the name? Kiwi is our oldest son's favorite fruit.