How We Started Jam

October 9, 2026

Fair warning: this is a long one. But we wanted to share the whole story: the real process, the love, and the family that went into building Jam. Jam didn't come from a big corporation looking for its next way to make a buck. It came from a real problem in our own kitchen, solved by a real family. So grab a coffee (or a glass of wine), and let's start at the beginning.

My wife and I love to cook. I grew up working in restaurants in the Northeast, and my wife grew up in the Midwest, where every meal was home-cooked straight from the family cookbook. So we have a natural love for trying new things and making home-cooked meals. We love everything from grilling to baking and everything in between.

We always knew we wanted to give our kids what we had: those home-cooked meals when you got home from a game, which are even better as leftovers the next day. And not only the meals, but the curiosity, the experimenting, the pairings, the diversity of cultures. It's not just cooking; it's everything. When we travel, we go to explore, and food is a big part of that. We want our kids to see something on a menu they've never had before and get excited about trying it.

When we first met, our meal-planning process consisted of walking into the grocery store, seeing what was on sale, and grabbing a side and a bottle of wine to go with it. Or we would decide to check out a new restaurant in town.

Fast-forward three kids. What used to be a stroll down a grocery aisle is now the chaotic process of feeding a family. Each week we're trying to manage multiple sports, school events, parent meetings, birthdays, laundry, the list goes on. Oh yeah, and don't forget our actual full-time jobs, or maybe some time to go for a run. But we love it. We grew up in chaos and can't wait for the volleyball game or meeting the new teacher. We love seeing our family grow and go through all of life's experiences, good and bad.

The challenge is still getting those home-cooked meals on the table through all that chaos.

Who has time for a Costco run this week?
What do you want to eat this week?
He ate chicken last week but hates it this week.
What was the meal we tried last Thursday?
What can the kids eat from this?

So we looked for something that could help us. Surely there must be an app for this, and there was… a lot of them. After finding what we thought were the top solutions, we tried them out. What we found, though, was that each app solved a very specific part of the problem. Saving and organizing recipes, planning meals, tracking grocery lists: each app we found solved one problem, and maybe a little bit of the next. The next issue we ran into was getting a family account. Not many apps let you share across multiple people, which was a dealbreaker for us.

The other option was using Claude or ChatGPT, which are awesome at coming up with ideas when you're stuck, whether it's adapting a recipe for the kids or thinking of a side at the store. But those are one-off solutions. Finding a way to share that recipe, tracking which ingredients you need to buy, reminding the chat about my kids' allergies every time: there's still a lot of frustration in the process.

With all the options out there, the best we could manage was three different subscriptions, each of which may or may not be shareable, plus an AI chat we tried to work into the mix. It was still a fragmented setup that usually caused more headaches, and it definitely didn't give us back the time we wanted to spend with our family instead of figuring out what to cook.

So we started brainstorming on our own. How do we solve the messy chaos of meal planning for a whole family while keeping it flexible enough to adapt as things change? We started by breaking down our main problems:

Problem 1: The Family Account

Every app charges by the person. What if we only had to pay one price for the whole family? Our oldest daughter doesn't meal-plan, but she likes to save recipes and cook every once in a while. Is that worth a monthly subscription? We also want anyone to be able to jump in and take over. If I'm supposed to cook dinner but get stuck at one of the kids' soccer games, my wife can pick it up in the app because it's all shared. Or maybe I have time to stop at the grocery store, but my wife has the list.

This would be easy if one app were shared with the whole family and you didn't have to decide who deserves a subscription.

Problem 2: The Recipes

I hate cooking from recipe websites, mainly because of the ads. Trying to check the ingredients in the store, or follow along while cooking?! The page constantly refreshes and jumps me back to the top. I have to scroll through someone's life story, the pop-ups… it's miserable! The other problem is that we have recipes saved all over the place: Pinterest, Instagram, a note with a bunch of links. This makes it hard both to share a recipe and to find where I saved it. If I have Claude create a recipe for me, I have to copy and paste it into a note and then keep track of that note.

One shared cookbook for the whole family, where I can bring in recipes from anywhere and have them saved in a consistent format, would be a huge time-saver!

Problem 3: The Meal Plan

We came across a couple of good ones, but most of them lock you into their flow. They don't adapt to the messiness of real life. Plenty of apps can whip up five meals for the week and build a grocery list for them within your budget in minutes. But they're usually focused on either the specific diet you want or the budget you have. That works, but usually for one person solving one problem. Not everyone in my family cares about the specific diet I'm on that week. Also, life changes. I don't want to go find a new app when my priorities change.

What if we just had a simple way to track what we wanted to eat for the week, like a basic calendar-style view where I could see the week's meals and easily click into a recipe when I'm ready to cook?

Problem 4 (sort of): The Grocery List

We've been using a list app that serves its purpose. It syncs in real time, it's shared among the family, and I can rearrange items and check them off as I move through the grocery store. We also use it for other things: packing for trips, books to read, gifts, etc. But since so much of it is tied to shopping for our meals, we thought it earned its place in completing the full flow: Recipes → Meal Plan → Grocery List.

These were the main problems we set out to solve for our family. So we went to work, using Problem 1 as the foundation for everything we built.

The Recipes

Our first version of Jam focused on importing and organizing recipes. We could import a recipe from a URL, and Jam would organize it into an easy format: ingredients, steps, comments, and a source link so you can always refer back to it. From there, we expanded to social media links and images, so we could snap a pic and import it. We also added free-text import, so if we used Claude or ChatGPT, we could copy and paste the recipe right into Jam.

Next was organizing the recipes into cookbooks. This made it easy to sort recipes into dinner, breakfast, sides, etc., and find what we were looking for. Everybody in the family contributes to one shared cookbook! No more "I think I saved that recipe on Pinterest?"

The Meal Plan

We wanted something rigid enough to follow but flexible enough to adapt to life, and something that works for both heavy planning and lightweight tracking. It's not always as simple as spending an hour planning the week on Sunday, going grocery shopping, and cooking your planned meals. Sunday planning gets skipped, you crave something midweek, a volleyball game runs late, you see something on sale at the grocery store, you don't feel like grilling outside in the rain. As the saying goes: if plan A doesn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters.

We kept it simple by showing just the next few days, with open slots you can fill or leave empty:

Add as many recipes or notes as you want to a single day, for as many or as few days as you like.
Slots can be filled with recipes or notes, so you can add a meal or maybe just a quick note on a Wednesday for pizza night!
Combine notes and recipes: add a dinner recipe, then use a note for the side so you don't forget.
Add meals from the meal plan, or if you're looking through the cookbook and see something good, add it right from the recipe.
When the kids ask, "What's for dinner?!", you can tell them to look in Jam.

The List

Similar to the meal plan, we wanted to keep this flexible. It can be used for more than just grocery lists. We covered the three main things we needed: real-time sync (my wife loves adding things while I'm at the store), the ability to check and uncheck items, and, of course, sharing it with the whole family. Tying this into the recipes and meal plan, we added the option to add ingredients from a single recipe or from multiple meals on the meal plan.

Building It

Getting there is half the fun! Talking through the flows and flexibility over a bottle of wine with my wife, adding features based on what we needed, slowly iterating as it worked for us: it was exciting. We were solving our problem in real time. One day we found ourselves manually typing handwritten recipes into Jam, so we thought it would be nice to just snap a picture and have it saved as a recipe. We wanted a simple way to add notes to the meal plan, so we added it. We saw how nice it would be to have real-time updates in the list, so we put it in. Building it with the family was truly an enjoyable experience.

We kept it contained in Apple's TestFlight and made it work for our family. It started to really help our day-to-day, saving us hours and the stress of all the work we were putting into just getting a couple of meals planned. Then we started to think: we can't be the only ones dealing with this stress and this time-consuming process. If it's giving us time back to enjoy our family, it can probably do the same for other families. We started talking to other families like ours, and their problems were very similar to ours. So we decided to share the solution!

Once we decided we were going to make it public, we focused on tying the whole experience together. We added an explore page where you can quickly search, find, and add recipes to your cookbook. After that, we had a solid flow throughout the whole process. But one thing still felt off. We found ourselves still leaving the app for certain tasks, like figuring out a quick side while at the store, getting ideas for a protein we just found on sale, or finding a good wine pairing for a steak. We started brainstorming how to bring these one-off moments into the app and make them feel like part of the flow.

The Jam Assistant

That's when we decided to add the Jam assistant. AI assistants are great for generating quick ideas in a pinch, rather than searching the web. But they also have a weakness: context. That covers both the context you have to put into a chat and getting what you need back out of it. To get a good response from a chatbot, it helps to give it context up front. If you just ask it for a side for tonight, it might suggest potatoes when your main course is pasta. If it gives you a recipe and you want to share it, your best option is copy and paste. Adding the Jam assistant solves both of those problems:

Ask for a side, and it will not only find tonight's meal on your meal plan and suggest something relevant, but also check your family's preferences to make sure it isn't suggesting something you don't like or are allergic to.
Does the side it just suggested need a couple of ingredients? Ask Jam to add them to your grocery list.
Don't feel like planning dinners for the week? Jam has the full context of your cookbook, so there's no sorting through a bunch of random options from a generic AI chat.
If it creates a new recipe, just ask it to save it to your cookbook.

The Jam assistant already has your context. You don't have to repeatedly tell it what your child is allergic to or figure out how to share the five-day meal plan it just created with your husband or wife and then track the grocery list. The best part is that it's not a black box. You don't have to wonder why it keeps recommending certain things. It responds based on your saved preferences, which you can always view and adjust in Settings. We also gave it the ability to recognize your family's patterns and suggest new preferences. It's up to you whether to add them or add your own.

To top it all off, we wanted to stay true to the family account: one price for the whole family. We also wanted to price it so it's still worth it even if you only use the cookbook to save recipes, or only use the meal plan. You can save hours every week for about the price of a Starbucks run.

Since we use it every day, we're constantly looking for ways to improve it, from connecting lists to grocery ordering to adding a community section where parents can share meal-planning hacks for kids. And we're always open to new ideas! Just let us know.

That's our family's story of how Jam came to be. We hope it helps your family the way it has helped ours and gives you back that time together. Whether you use just the cookbook, just the meal plan, or let the full flow work for you, we hope that instead of stressing about what to cook, you can enjoy the beauty of cooking and pass it on to your loved ones.