[App Friday] This recipe and meal planner app has made it to Google Play’s best apps this year

As we approach the end of the year, Google has announced its list of Best Android apps of 2021 for India, which also includes a list of best apps for everyday essentials. 

Among them is Sortizy, a platform that offers smart grocery shopping, recipe recommendations, meal planning, managing kitchen inventory, and more. 

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Developed by IIT, NIT, and BIT alumni, the Hyderabad-based app offers thousands of multimedia recipe guides, easy meal planning, and grocery managing tools. 

With the holiday time being here and food becoming the focus in this period, we picked this app for our app review section this week, and here are our first impressions.

Let’s get started

You can start using the app with a one-step signup process via your contact number or email ID. While users have the option to skip creating an account, it is recommended to sign up for personalised experience.

After downloading the app, you choose your food preference -- vegan, vegetarian, eggetarian, and non-vegetarian. 

We chose the vegetarian option and landed on a curated page that was very informative and looks like a social media for food with other options. The homepage has a search bar with quick search options like healthy desserts, quick recipes, alternative grains, salads, and others. 

The features

Upon scrolling down, you find recipes, which are featured in the most innovative way. The recipes are a step-by-step guide like using cards so that you can cook step by step. 

The first card shows ingredients with pictures, which is followed by an audio instruction along with text and image to describe the next step like cutting vegetables, adding spices, oil, water, mix, etc. This means you don't have to pause and play like you do while watching recipe videos on YouTube before you can finish your dish.

Sortizy’s variety of recipes is immense, ranging from turmeric milk to pasta, from vegan recipes to immunity-boosting recipes, and Indian dishes to continental snacks. 

The app makers also have content at play. Each recipe has information like calories, nutrition, reviews, and cooking equipment. It even suggests the best time to eat it -- like aloo gobi for winters. 

Meal planner and grocery shopping

To help you plan a day’s meal or for a week or a month, the app’s meal planner feature lets you browse recipes and add them in your planner or calendar, which you can rejig as per your preference. 

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If you want to add that particular item to your meal plan, you can do that as well -- imagine having a food menu of your own! There is also a shop button on each recipe that lets you create your grocery shopping list. The shopping feature helps you make shopping lists based on the dishes you have picked. These curated grocery lists also ensure that you buy exactly what you need for the upcoming week.

Other features 

The app makers say Sortizy has been created for people to achieve their long-pending goals of switching to cooking at home - because it is one of the shortest paths to achieve a healthy lifestyle. 

The app offers several other features like customising the recipes and instructions according to the number of people you're cooking for. 

Besides this, you can search for recipes based on ingredients. For instance, if you have only potato at home, you can just mention potato in the app and it will show only potato-based recipes. You can also add multiple ingredients.

The app makers say that when they created the app, they kept in mind the dilemma faced by people when deciding what to cook. Hence, the app helps in finding the right recipes based on dietary preferences, plans, and ingredients. 

The app also has a plethora of recipes on its homepage, be it under the trending tab or the spotlight tab, which is helpful in case you cannot think of what to cook. Besides, you also create your own profile on the app, which acts as your own tracker.

Ecommerce and videos

The app is not just a vanilla recipe or cooking assistant app. It has new-age features like ecommerce and short-form videos. 

Similar to Instagram reels, the explore button on the homepage lets you browse multiple foods or recipe videos, and also lets you become a chef by sharing your own reels. We particularly liked the feature as the app seems like an all-in-one platform with social media features for people who like cooking. 

We can say that it’s a cooking-focussed app that has various aspects such as ecommerce, where, along with recipes, you are also shown the utensils required to cook, which you can buy through the app. 

Sortizy also works like a marketplace featuring products from the likes of Amazon and Flipkart. This seems to be a revenue model for the company as it might be following a referral-fee model.

The verdict

The app seems really new on the play store, but despite fewer downloads, Google has listed it as one of the top apps for everyday essentials of the year, which Google said is to encourage innovation. 

Rightly so, Sortizy brings everything under one roof -- from easy-to-cook recipe cards to meal planning, grocery lists, kitchen management, videos, competitions, nutrition tracking, food planning, and so on, without making it cluttered and rather coming across as one of a kind in the food/meal planning category. 

Overall, we liked the app and found it very well suited for Indian users. However, one observation is that its curation feature seems to be still learning as the homepage shows non-vegetarian dishes despite selecting vegetarian. Also, we wish if we could search dishes with regional names like South Indian, Bengali, or Bihari, etc. 

The app seems to be a work-in-progress and we would recommend you to use this app to organise your food and eating habits.