The food feed: three ways to find the next thing you cook.

Three feeds, three questions

Most apps have one feed and try to make it answer every question at once, which is why it answers none of them well. Foodies has three, and each one is the answer to a different question you might have arrived with.

Knowing which one you are in is most of the skill of using a food discovery app well. People who complain that a feed is repetitive are usually in Following; people who complain that it is full of strangers are usually in For You.

For You, and what it reads

For You is the ranked feed, and what it ranks on is your own behaviour: the posts you save, the ones you open rather than scroll past, how long you stay on a video, the cuisines that keep recurring in what you like, and the shape of the graph around the accounts you already follow. Freshness is weighed alongside all of that, so something posted an hour ago can still reach you rather than the feed being permanently owned by whatever already went round the internet.

What it does not read is anybody's advertising budget. There is no paid placement in the Foodies feed and no advertising SDK in the app, so nothing is in front of you because somebody bought the slot. That is a smaller claim than it sounds and an unusual one to be able to make.

Saves are the heaviest honest signal you can give it, because a save means intent rather than approval. If you want For You to change, change what you save.

Following, in order, with nothing inserted

Following is strictly chronological: the accounts you chose, newest first, with nothing injected, promoted or reordered. This is what following is supposed to mean, and it is worth stating explicitly because it has become unusual.

The practical consequence is that Following is exactly as good as your follow list and no better. If it feels thin, follow more people; if it feels noisy, unfollow, which is a low-drama action that carries none of the finality of a block. Curating this list is the most direct control you have over the app, and the one most people never exercise.

Nearby: what it shows, and what it is not

Nearby shows posts from people around you. It does not show restaurants, because Foodies has no restaurants: there are no venue listings, no reviews, no star ratings, no rankings and no bookings anywhere in the app.

Here is the mechanism, precisely. When somebody posts, they may attach an approximate location. Before anything is stored, the coordinate is snapped to a grid of roughly one kilometre, so what exists on the server is "somewhere in this square of the city", not an address. Nearby surfaces posts whose snapped coordinates fall around yours, ordered by proximity and recency.

So "see what people are eating in your city" is an accurate description. "A map of the best restaurants near me" is not, and there is no setting that turns one into the other. We would rather lose the visitor here than lose them thirty seconds after a download.

What Nearby is genuinely good for is that ingredients are local. The person a few neighbourhoods over shops where you shop, hits the same seasonal gaps, and knows which shop has the thing this week. It is also the fastest route into a local food community, because proximity gives two strangers something immediate to talk about.

Location is optional throughout. Decline the permission and every other part of Foodies works exactly as before; your own posts simply do not appear in anybody's Nearby.

How to train a feed in a week

A ranked feed is a mirror with a delay. If yours is showing you food you do not care about, it is usually reporting your behaviour back accurately, and a week of deliberate use will move it.

• Save aggressively for a few days. Not everything you admire, everything you would actually cook. This is the strongest signal available.
• Open posts rather than skimming. Dwell is read; a post you opened and read the caption of counts for more than a like given at speed.
• Follow ten specific people, not ten popular ones. The graph around accounts you follow feeds into ranking, so following the ten biggest accounts in the app teaches it that you want whatever is popular.
• Unfollow without ceremony. The follow list is the input; pruning it is the fastest correction there is.
• Use Following as your baseline. If Following is good and For You is not, the ranking needs more signal. If Following is also thin, the problem is the follow list.

Discovery is worthless if you cannot find it again

The failure at the end of every good feed session is the same: you saw four things worth cooking, and by Thursday you have none of them. Saves fix half of that and collections fix the rest, a collection is a named list you create, and the name is the whole trick. "Recipes" is a graveyard; "twenty minutes, nothing in the fridge" is retrievable in six months because it describes the moment you will need it.

A saved post keeps the dish, the caption and the cook together, so you get back the person as well as the picture, which matters, because the follow-up question you will have on Thursday can be asked. More on this in sharing food photos.

Browsing without an account

You can read the feed as a guest with no sign-up. Ranking has less to work with in that state, for the obvious reason that there is no history attached to anybody, so For You is closer to a general popularity and freshness ordering until you sign in and start saving things. Sign-in is with Apple, one tap, no email address.

If you would rather be pointed at something specific than browse, the cooking guides collect quick dinners, healthy cooking, vegan cooking, Italian technique, breakfasts, desserts and meal prep, and they are free to read without the app at all.

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