💡 Context-Aware Market-to-Table Recipe Discovery

[github-actions[bot]]

Summary

Customers browsing a market's vendor list or a specific vendor's products can discover seasonal recipes that use ingredients available at that market today. Recipes are matched to products from checked-in vendors, creating a "cook this tonight with what's here" experience. This drives basket size (customers buy ingredients they wouldn't have otherwise) and creates a sticky engagement loop around seasonal eating.

Market Signal

CSA subscription boxes routinely include recipes matched to the week's produce — it's a proven engagement driver for the local food segment. No farmers market app offers recipe discovery matched to real-time vendor availability. The broader food app ecosystem (Yummly, Tasty, Mealime) treats recipes and grocery as separate concerns; unifying them at the market level is a whitespace opportunity that none of these apps address.

User Signal

The Seasonal Produce Discovery Overlay idea (#362) highlights customer interest in seasonal awareness but focuses on education ("what's in season"). Recipe discovery goes further by providing an actionable use case: "here's what you can make with what's available today." The PRD's intent-based shopping planner (Growth feature) contemplates item-to-vendor-to-market pathways; recipe discovery extends this naturally to recipe-to-item-to-vendor.

Technical Opportunity

Integration with a recipe API (Spoonacular or Edamam) filtered by produce category tags already in the vendor product catalog (FR12). The matching logic: query recipes where required ingredients overlap with products from checked-in vendors at a given market. The existing product catalog data model (vendor_products table) provides the ingredient-side data. A new GraphQL query (recipeSuggestions(marketId)) can orchestrate the match server-side.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	med	Requires recipe API integration and produce-category-to-ingredient mapping; depends on vendor product catalog maturity
Impact	med	Drives basket size and creates a unique engagement loop; differentiates from directory-style competitors
Urgency	low	Best value after product catalogs are well-populated (Phase 2) — requires FR12 to be fully adopted by vendors

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: Recipe matching depends on vendors consistently tagging their products, which is unreliable in early adoption when product catalogs are sparse.

Rebuttal: This is explicitly a Phase 2 feature — it requires product catalog maturity (FR12 fully populated). By the time the app reaches Growth phase (40+ vendors with complete profiles), the product tag data will be rich enough. MVP can start with category-level matching ("recipes using tomatoes") rather than specific product matching ("recipes using Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes"), lowering the data quality bar significantly.

Suggested Next Step

Evaluate Spoonacular and Edamam recipe APIs for ingredient-based filtering, pricing, and rate limits. Design the recipe card UI component and its placement in the market/vendor detail views. Define the produce category taxonomy that bridges vendor product tags to recipe ingredients.