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.

We built KiWi because we had to.

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.

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), so I ended up spending my evenings alone with things like "Jaccard token similarity, Zipfian distribution, Fisher-Yates shuffle, Levenshtein distance, Haversine distance, and finite-state lookahead constraints for morphological false-positive prevention." At some point you have to remember it's really just about making a product that works. For shopping, for meal planning, and for finding the best recipes for your family.

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