There is an app for finding recipes, one for grocery lists, one for counting calories, one for the week's meal plan, one to figure out what to do with leftovers, a notebook somewhere for the meals that work, and a cookbook on the shelf that hasn't been opened in two summers. Each does its own little thing. None of them talk to each other. And when evening comes, the real question remains: what are we cooking?
Umay was born from this exact frustration.
Fifteen cooking apps, seriously?
We wanted a single place. You say what you have on hand, Umay creates a real recipe, complete with the budget, nutrition, a grocery list you can share on WhatsApp, and local shops around you. The fridge gets scanned by photo. The week gets planned. Leftovers become tomorrow's lunch. Big tables have their menus, votes, and who's-bringing-what. The tracker knows what you ate because you cooked it here, not because you weighed your rice to the gram.
None of this is revolutionary on its own. What changes everything is that it all lives together.
A recipe is a starting point
Historical recipe sites treat a recipe like a monument: frozen, surrounded by pop-ups, with an auto-playing video. A cookbook is worse: beautiful, expensive, and completely unable to adapt to the fact that there are three of you tonight and you're out of heavy cream.
Here, the recipe moves. You go from two to six servings, and the quantities follow. You ask for a lighter or cheaper version, and you get it with explained substitutions. You remix a classic, take out what you don't like, ask a question along the way, and the assistant answers you about that specific recipe. Your library is yours: what you modify stays with you, organized in your collections, without gathering dust.
The world is the best cookbook
Open the map: every dish is pinned to its true country of origin, and dozens of them are lit up. Thai yam nua, Andalusian ajo blanco, Osaka takoyaki, Greek frappé coffee. Not as postcards: as dishes you cook on a Tuesday, at home, with ingredients you can find. Food is the simplest gateway to a culture, and it's much more accessible than a plane ticket.
We want you to taste things you don't know yet. That's kind of the whole point.
An unapologetic art direction
Food deserves better than photos yellowed by a 2011 flash. At Umay, the flash is a choice: bold colors, saturated backgrounds, dishes placed dead center like objects you want to grab. Cooking should make you hungry before you even start. If our photos make you smile, that's intentional.
The right to be lazy
Let's be honest: some nights, you just don't want to do anything. Umay literally has a mode for that. Ten-minute assemblies, ideas using whatever's lying around, zero guilt. Eating well doesn't mean performing every day. It's also knowing how to throw together a plate of melon and prosciutto in front of a movie and considering it cooking. It counts, we checked.
For everyone, exactly as they like
Vegan, gluten-free, halal, kosher, allergies, tight budget, big table, kids in their peak nugget phase: the profile remembers once, and everything adapts after that, from composed recipes to dinner suggestions. There is no single right way to eat. There is yours, and our job is to make it easy.
What we believe
- The best recipe is the one you can make tonight, with what's in your fridge
- A recipe that doesn't adapt to you isn't finished
- The world's great classics can be learned at home
- Food waste is solved by better ideas, not guilt
- Laziness is a use case, not a failure