Why Zimmer exists

Zimmer wasn't built by a team with a pitch deck. It was built by one person, standing in his own kitchen, missing it.

I saved recipes everywhere you save them: screenshots, bookmarks, notes, saved reels and so on. When it was time to plan the week, it was all scattered across five apps, and I didn't stand a chance of remembering where I'd put that one recipe.

And when I'd finally landed on one, I'd often be holding a recipe wrapped in long prose and ads, or a video recipe running on repeat in some clever reel format. Only then would I start thinking about what I had at home already (was there more milk, and were there still eggs in the box?). It always got chaotic and messy, and it ended with me falling back on the same familiar classic (carbonara was the clear winner).

The apps I came across either wanted to sell me a complete box of ready-made meals as a package deal, or they were good at structuring recipes but left the planning entirely to me. They did one thing well, but what I needed was one system that was tied together, that I had full control over, and that could help me keep things on track whenever the urge to cook showed up.

One rule from the start

So I built it myself, by one rule: the app should remove the planning hassle, strengthen the joy of cooking and nurture the learning. The fun part, finding food, trying things, changing them and learning from mistakes and successes, should be brought into the light. The dull part, the overview, the planning, the shopping list and the eternal who-buys-what, all the things that so often stop you before you've even started, Zimmer takes care of instead.

Less to plan. More to explore.

One whole, with you at the wheel

For me, the exciting thing about food is discovering it. Stumbling on a dish I've never made, or being challenged by a cuisine I don't know very well. That's the part the app should make more room for, and it's why everything in it hangs together as one whole that you steer yourself. The recipes, the meal plan, the shopping list and the pantry talk to each other, and Zimmie becomes your extended arm, connecting it all with ease and doing things for you, when you want it to.

For me, what killed the spark was the jumps from a recipe or an idea to actually ending up in the kitchen, experimenting with the food and getting the dish on the table. That's where Zimmer lives. I live with my girlfriend, and we naturally share the kitchen at home. We never used to get the plan made together (where would we even have done that?), and at the supermarket we'd stumble over each other trying to watch the same shopping list, instead of moving freely with a connected one. Coordinating, when there's more than one of you, was in many ways one more little hurdle.

No two weeks look the same, either. In some stretches there's energy for all of it, and in others the good habits crack because time runs short. That's where the app should carry you. A good week's plan should be there to save and use again, and good habits should be something you can set up so they hold, even when everyday life tightens a week later.

It should make you better

And then there's the part of Zimmer that grew out of more time with the food. Namely experimenting with it, and learning technique through experience. I'm no world-class cook, but with the rise of language models and how sharp they've become on cooking, that knowledge is now available to anyone with an interest in learning about food. So the recipes in Zimmer are built on exactly that, and written to teach. The hard part isn't getting an AI to write a recipe for you. The hard part is making sure you can trust what it writes. That's why I've spent a long time building a system to make sure Zimmer's own curated recipes can be trusted. The foundation is the classics, dishes that have been tested in thousands of kitchens around the world, so there's an answer key to hold a recipe up against. And every recipe has to pass a set of fixed checks, where times, temperatures and quantities are cross-checked, before it's allowed into Zimmer's kitchen. If it fails, it gets redone. That work is a story of its own, and I'll tell it in its own article once the testing has run its full course.

So when you're at the stove, the information comes one step at a time, with the small technical tips folded in right where the dish has its particular points to watch. That's also the road ahead. We're working towards a whole language around learning and exploring cuisines, technique and preference, with levels you can grow through, and techniques you start to recognise from dish to dish. The ambition, really, is that after a few months with the app you've become a little better in the kitchen, and that the knowledge sits in the recipe itself, if it's been a while since you last made the dish.

The taste profile is the latest and probably most far-reaching learning idea: I wanted to be able to get to know my own taste, and use it in the whole way I plan and explore. The profile gathers what you actually cook, what you come back to, and what you had good words for, and shows your patterns back to you. And it uses them to lend a hand: reminding you of a dish you'd forgotten you loved, or filling a gap in the week with something close to what you already enjoy. All of it only if you've said yes, and always with an explanation of why you're seeing what you're seeing.

Built close to the people who use it

Zimmer is built close to the people who use it. Suggestions go straight from the app to me, not into a queue at a support department. That's probably the one thing an app built by one person can do that the big ones can't. There's no distance between what you wish for and the person building it.

It isn't finished. Hopefully it never will be. But the direction is set. Everyday cooking should feel manageable again, and you should get a little better at the stove along the way. And the time should go to the table, not the list.