Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Matt Paulin
Last week the Seattle Think Tank brainstormed on the question “What can you do with an API for food delivery?“ and came up with the following ideas. If you are curious, this explains more of where all these ideas came from. Also, a disclaimer, I don’t know of any such API from Amazon or any other food delivery service. But, if and when this is publicly available, all of these ideas become possible.
- 5x5x5 Bachelor Recipes : A 5 star meal for under 5 dollars in 5 minutes. Recipes that would compete with fast food places. The user would just need to select them, the food would be ordered via Amazon Fresh and sent to their door with instructions.
- Habit Builder : Build up a record of your eating habit from what you are ordering. Use this to improve your diet
- Corn Syrup Tracker : Track how much high fructose corn syrup your using based on what you are ordering.
- Scripted Elimination Diet : You put in your preferences, and all the ingredients you need are sent to you in a planned out schedule so you can do this
- Allergy Alert : A 3rd party service you order your groceries through. It checks against a database of products and ingredients to alert you if you ordered something with an allergy in it. For instance if you have have a child allergic to peanuts.
- DIY Expensive Dinner : Take a picture of a meal from a restaurant. Send the picture to Amazon Remembers. Find out what it is, go to Big Oven and get the recipe, have all the ingredients put on your Amazon Fresh order for next week.
- One Click Recipes : Publish recipes on Amazon as a PDF to the Kindle. If someone wants to make the recipe they simply click and the ingredients are added to their Amazon Fresh shopping cart.
- Home Quartermaster : Amazon does do more than food. Blue tooth devices in your house tell an Amazon Fresh agent program when you are running low on something; paper towels, kitty litter, etc. That in turn adds more supplies to your shopping list automatically. No more running out of coffee filters.
- “Rot or Not” : Assuming you could build a “Smart Fridge” that knows what food is in it. It would know when something has gone bad, for instance the milk. Then order you more.
- Grocery Guardian : Auto tracking of foods considered dangerous. For instance, if spinach is being recalled, it warns you not to purchase it.
To conclude, I don’t know of an API for ordering food. But, it is entirely possible that it exist or might just show up next week. When it does, maybe this list of ideas can spark a new start-up or two.
