By: Juliete Seo
It all started with a plate of buttery noodles.
On a typical Friday night on Cal Poly’s campus, Raquel Smith looked glumly at the lack of options. She scooped a pile of buttery noodles onto her plate. Later that night, Raquel decided to cook up something new she could eat. She found a recipe online and began to cook risotto.
Smith remembers feeling frustrated.
She took a picture of her finished risotto, and then posted a picture of it. She continued to do this until a friend suggested that she become a food blogger, so she did. Smith didn’t know it at the time, but this was the start of the creation of the Brunch app.
Smith launched Brunch in 2021. Brunch is an app that connects recipe creators and people who want to use their recipes, socially and content-wise. She noticed there wasn’t a place for posting recipes and engaging with the people who downloaded them. Furthermore, she didn’t like the process of using someone’s recipe for free without giving them anything in return or knowing their personal story. And lastly, there wasn’t one platform where people could easily store all of their recipes in one place.
“I want food bloggers and other recipe creators to be able to make an income in a way that doesn’t drive people nuts and drive people to literally steal their content,” Smith said. “I want to be a part of that, but the platform doesn’t exist,” Smith said. So she decided to build it.
The home page of the Brunch app allows users to share their recipes with the community.
Smith has been working in the recipe space for almost a decade. She started as a food blogger in 2010 when she was a student at Cal Poly. She switched paths when she realized that she preferred the product manager side of things, coding, and building websites. She is a self-taught coder and now teaches others how to build their own websites. She was a lead developer at her previous company Dozuki.
It was in December 2020 that she had the idea for the app, and she launched a year later.
“I felt really called back to the recipe space,” Smith said. “There’s still a lot of unresolved problems there, and so I decided to jump in full-time and put a product out there that really solves the needs of both sides of the equation, for the creators and the home cooks.”
Being able to solve both sides of the equation, “It’s really super rewarding when you finally have that in your hands and you can use it and know that this is fulfilling my vision,” Smith said.
Smith’s passion for food is deep-rooted. She says that we not only need food for survival, but that most people enjoy eating good food. She worries that we are losing this sense of community as the world is becoming digital.
“The people who are participating in this food economy, they’re not necessarily participating in community with people,” Smith said. She described how people typically look up recipes online and use them but then leave the site without knowing anything about the recipe creator’s background or story. There is no social connection in the process.
Brunch fills this void by being a place where people can be pragmatic and simply look for recipes, but also a community where people can connect with the lives of the recipe creators, she said. The app gives creators a space to share their own stories so there is a story behind the recipes.
“The stories do have a place and they do have meaning, it’s just the context that’s wrong. And that’s what we’re going to be fixing,” Smith said.
There are many other existing problems out there in any industry that can be solved, and Smith offers her advice for college-aged students who aspire to fix one.
“The way someone says that is to pick a problem where someone’s hair is on fire, something that you’re really solving in that market,” Smith said. “And then come up with your idea.”
Video by: Nikki Morgan
For entrepreneurs who want to build a business, she says to start with your target market of an industry that you deeply care about, and think about the problems they’re facing.
“I’d say that there’s a lot of utility in building something just to build something if you have no experience in building something,” Smith said. She recommends finding a problem that you can solve but not one that you would get too easily attached to.
“What’s important is that I know the market that I care about and I know the problems that I’m trying to solve really well,” Smith said.
Smith has been making Brunch an even more social platform by planning to work with Tik Tok creators. However, for now, the app is focused on connecting food bloggers with the people who use their recipes.
Feedback from initial users has been positive, Smith said. “They really love how it brings all of your food content together into one place,” she said. “Right now most people have all of their recipes saved across Pinterest, Instagram, Tik Tok and both parts in their browser. There’s not a single location that can hold all of them.”
In the digital age where community is difficult to foster, Smith hopes to mediate this for like-minded people in a food community.
If you are interested in participating in this community, you can download the Brunch app on the App store.
