Mezzo: The Spotify® of food

Pretty much everyone has had one of those days. It’s a Thursday night, you get home after long day hunched over a laptop on the sofa (#wfh). After a few hundred hours of Teams calls you just want to throw something in the pan and wait for a Masterchef-level dish to arrive on your plate.

You open the kitchen cupboards and they’re absolutely stuffed full. Amazing. 

But wait… Oh dear.

There’s nothing to eat. How can this be? 

You delve in, pushing ancient tins of tuna aside. Half a jar of turmeric, not great. Quarter of a packet of rice, not enough. A breadstick? Oh dear. Can you eat raw bay leaves? Probably not. How long has that tin of treacle been in there? Better leave it. 

It’s the same story in kitchens everywhere; cupboards and fridges of food we don’t know what to do with. Sadly a huge amount of this ends up going to waste. According to WRAP, 6.4 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten is wasted in the UK every year. That’s enough to make 15 billion meals.

But what’s the real problem here?

You’ve guessed it, a lot of it is down to how we make our meals. Our top-down approach to cooking and purchasing things in bulk means we often have bits left over. Supermarkets don’t sell things in teaspoons, they sell them by the jar. A few recipes later and we’ve lost track of what we’ve got and it’s easier to start again than go hunting through the kitchen trying to create something with a random collection of niche ingredients. Hard work.

What if there was another way to cook? What if you knew exactly what you had, how much you had and when you last used it? What if you could combine your cupboard ingredients into one fabulous recipe? 

That’s where Mezzo comes in. 

Mezzo can bring order to the fridge of chaos (although we did tidy this one a bit).

We think cooking should be less like work and more like Spotify®.

Libraries of ingredients, collections of favourites, playlists of recipes.

What are you in the mood for? 

Mezzo helps you keep track of the food you have and gives you suggestions of delicious recipes you can create with what you’ve got. It’s a one-stop shop for meal prep, where you can take inventory as you shop, check what you’ve got left and save tasty meal plans suggested by the Mezzo recipe search. 

Imagine being able to keep track of what you’ve got by just scanning a receipt from a food shop with your phone.

Mezzo can help save you money on food, help save the planet by reducing the amount of food going to waste in the UK every year and make those Thursday evening meals a whole lot more fun.

For more detail on project Mezzo head to the project page and discover how we created the concept.