Using patented technology and a proprietary cooking pan, Smartypans — an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant — brings nutrition transparency to the kitchen while making cooking interactive, social and healthy, all without requiring home cooks to unnecessarily restrict what they cook.
Rahul Baxi, co-founder and chief technology officer, spent time talking to us about the company, its mission and the innovation that makes Smartypans stand apart.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about Smartypans?
Smartypans is a platform that brings together people from all walks of life around their common passion for cooking. We also want to connect the world to conscious cooking, and when it comes to nutrition tracking and transparency, there’s no easy way for people to do that.
Existing solutions are often restrictive and make you cut out higher-calorie foods, various nuts and oils, and so forth. Basically, they cut out many of the ingredients home cooks use on a day-to-day basis, and you’re restricted to eating vegetables and salads. We wanted to provide a proper solution.
What is your solution, and how does it work?
The first product we’re rolling out is a cooking pan. You cook with it the way you usually do, and our technology continuously monitors each ingredient that goes into the pan, and how you’re cooking it. When you’re done, we document the entire recipe for you, and you can share it on your social channels and on the Smartypans platform.
Then other people can take the recipe from the Smartypans app and get step-by-step cooking instructions: It tells you when to add an ingredient, when to move on to the next step, how long to cook, when to increase or decrease the temperature, and more. And when you’re all done, you get a full nutritional profile for the meal you just cooked. It also integrates with fitness trackers and a health dashboard on our platform. Everything is in sync, and you don’t have to manually add any data anywhere.
What's the technology behind this magic?
We invented the technology that automatically identifies all the ingredients and measures the weight of each ingredient. We built our own foundational AI, and we got patents on our technology. So there’s a lot of invention happening within Smartypans.
What’s the origin story of the company?
The idea came from Prachi Baxi, who is my co-founder and my sibling. She’s a culinary nutritionist, and she oversaw nutrition compliance and audits for over 200 school districts on the East Coast. She also worked one-on-one with clients as a nutrition counselor, and she saw that people are excited about cooking, but existing solutions restricted them, and she wanted to change that.
We also wanted to keep the cultural importance of cooking. Prachi and I were raised in Australia and the UK. Now that we live in the U.S., cooking is how we connect with our family’s culture. For example, cooking my grandma’s recipes — that’s how I feel connected to my culture.
Smartypans sounds great for cooks of any age. Are there particular benefits for people who are 50-plus?
Numerous studies have suggested that being involved in some interactive activity keeps your brain active. Smartypans is an inherently interactive cooking technology that engages your brain to get people involved in making those cooking decisions.
Plus, we think that people who are 50-plus are perfect food content creators. They’ve been cooking for a long time, and they have a breadth of cooking content that they can share with the world, including younger people and their families.
What’s on the horizon for Smartypans?
Our launch is coming up later this year, and we’re excited about being able to help people by bringing nutrition transparency to the kitchen. By enabling people to make data-driven cooking decisions, people won’t have to rely on someone else or be limited to a restrictive approach to what they cook. So we’re excited to launch and let everyone be part of the Smartypans family.
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