Recipe Route and Fresh Fix are working together to ship meal boxes to people in WNY.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — There’s a new food app that’s helping people answer the question – what’s for dinner? And, it’s connecting Western New Yorkers with fresh, healthy, and local ingredients.
Nicholas Gunner came up with Recipe Route to make it easier for people to eat healthy and support local producers at the same time.
“This is more than just generating a recipe, it could potentially flip the supply-demand dynamic,” said Nicholas Gunner, Orbitist LLC and Recipe Route, Owner.
Gunner is the founder of Orbitist, which develops mapping software for agriculture. Recently, Gunner launched a new app, Recipe Route, which connects you with local farms to get fresh food delivered to your door.
“I was like, ‘can I just build the recipe app in the first place?’ So on reciperoute.org, you can download the app at the moment. It’s a great place to just generate a recipe with whatever you have on-hand,” said Gunner.
“So that was the first task, and then I thought, ‘what if I mapped all the the farm stands around my house?’ I rode my bike around, and I knew what was on those stands, and then I wired those in so I could generate a recipe based on what was on that map, and then I met Fresh Fix,” said Gunner.
“We kind of just all thought that it would be a really great fit to see how can we make just local food delivery even easier,” said Joshua McGuire, Fresh Fix, Business Manager.
Fresh Fix, a USDA-certified food hub, already has a strong relationship with Western New York farmers and delivers produce around our region, so it was the perfect partner to make Recipe Route happen.
“I think there’s a lot of things that we can make approachable that weren’t approachable before,” said McGuire.
The app is also being embraced by farmers.
“What’s exciting is to lower that barrier to entry, to get small producers the tools they need to get their product to market and not be like stuck in front of an Excel sheet for half the time they’re producing,” said Ryan Horwath, a developer at Orbitist.
For Gunner, it’s all about strengthening local food systems while making it easier for people to get fresh ingredients.
“For me, when I was using the app and testing it, getting basil that was marked on it [that was] harvested the day before that I was putting it into a recipe, that was pretty cool,” said Gunner.
Recipe Route is free to download in the App Store and Google Play.
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