Cooking Is a Decision: Ten Weeks In, Here's What We're Learning

We used to think Gen Z's biggest barrier in the kitchen was confidence. Then we watched my Gen Z crew take on dishes they'd never made — no hesitation. Read "It Looked Good, So I Wanted to Make It": It Wasn't Confidence for Them. It Was Something Else Entirely. →

We launched Saltpig on June 27, 2026, and four weeks after that, while looking at the early user data, I learned that "saving is a reflex, but cooking is a decision." Ten weeks post-launch, that's become less of a tagline and more of a diagnosis of what we built this app to do.

Here's where we are, and what we've learned getting here.

The numbers we stopped chasing

We've crossed 1,000 downloads across iOS and Android, in multiple countries — Canada is our second-largest market after the US. Nice milestones. But somewhere in the last few weeks, I stopped treating the download count as the number that matters.

Our cook-through rate — the share of saved recipes that actually turn into a logged cook — is still low. If I only looked at installs, I'd read that as a growth problem and spend more on ads. Instead, we've been in BigQuery watching what people actually do inside the app — and the real signal isn't the download curve, it's that our daily and weekly active users have stayed remarkably steady. People who find Saltpig stick around. They're just not converting saves into cooks at the rate we want yet.

Here's the thing, though: most cooking apps never measure this at all. Having a real number to chase — even a low one — already puts us ahead of where we started. And I've started to wonder if I'm asking the number to do something it structurally can't: saving is a reflex with no ceiling, but cooking is bounded by how many meals actually happen in a day. A saved-recipe collection might behave less like a to-do list and more like a shoe collection — it keeps growing, but only a few pairs ever find the right occasion. That's not failure. That might just be what a collection is for.

A close friend put a finer point on this for me. For a house like mine, with five people to feed, cooking is often the more economical choice: one grocery trip covers several meals for everyone, so the "opportunity" to cook shows up more often just by virtue of who's at the table. For someone cooking for one, the math flips — a single trip's worth of groceries can cost more than takeout that stretches across several days. The finite ceiling on cooking opportunity isn't just about time in the day; it's shaped by household size and what actually makes financial sense for the person standing in front of the fridge.

Regardless of household size, we want to find the right features to serve the people actually using Saltpig — leaning on the feedback we've already received and focusing on what makes the app make sense for whoever's standing in front of it. That means refining how Saltpig can become more of a household presence for our current users vs. just another app to try out.

What the content became

The other shift has been in how we show up. Alongside paid marketing, we've leaned into showing Saltpig in real kitchens — TikTok content of people actually cooking with the app, from our own personal accounts. It's been a genuinely fun project for our family and friends, who've ended up as most of the cast.

Our first real piece of produced content was a TikTok published in "Saltpig IRL" — riffing on the House of the Dragon episode where Rhaenyra serves her dinner guests a rat dish. Our rat prop was our own miniature schnauzer, Bento.

We also started a short-form animated series called Salt Days, built with Higgsfield — comedy and daily-life stories built around Saltpig characters. Between the two, we're covering both ends of what we want people to feel: this is a real tool real people use, and this brand doesn't take itself too seriously.

Why I still believe in this, in one very long story about Google Maps

I want to explain the "why" behind all of this, because it's not abstract for me — I've used Saltpig since April 2026, before it was mine to run, just as a home cook. I'm currently on a streak of cooking at least 4 days a week for 9 weeks now, and I'm genuinely motivated not to lose it.

Before Saltpig, my relationship to "what should I cook" looked like my relationship to "where should we eat" — which is to say, broken. I have so many restaurants bookmarked in Google Maps that the list is functionally useless. The sea of green labels overwhelms me. So I'd close the app, get hungrier, and end up at McDonald's.

Saltpig flipped that. Now I stand in front of my deep freezer, find a protein, search it in my own Saltpig kitchen, and browse things that once inspired me enough to save them. I remember the reel. I remember why I saved it. Cooking it and serving it to my family of five feels like crossing something off a list that used to only grow, never shrink — and it's a small way of honoring the creator whose content got me there in the first place.

Since starting, I've cooked dishes from Israel, Peru, Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, France, and Vietnam. I can genuinely say things now — "yeah, I can cook Israeli food," "yeah, I make a mean butter chicken" — that I couldn't say a year ago. That identity shift, more than any single recipe, is what I think Saltpig is actually for.

That shift isn't just personal curiosity — it's downstream of a generational shift in how people learn to cook at all. We're past the era of 20 cookbooks eating up cabinet space; the real question now is how many recipe collections you have saved on Instagram. Saltpig exists for the moment inspiration turns into an actual cooked meal, instead of one more open tab.

One story got its own post

Everyone in my house uses Saltpig, but everyone uses it differently. What I love most, as a founder, is hearing my Gen Z crew — nieces, my own kids — talk about saving recipes with actual intent to cook them. I still get asked if we have the ingredients, but getting into the kitchen is 100% on them and the app.

That same instinct led two of them to take on dishes they'd never made before — no hesitation, no sense of how long it'd actually take. Story worth its own post. Read "It Looked Good, So I Wanted to Make It": It Wasn't Confidence for Them. It Was Something Else Entirely. →

Where this points next

None of this is only a nice-story but it's a product problem, and it's the one I want us to solve next. If the app can turn "I want to make this" into an actual cooked, served meal even once, the cook-through number will follow. That's the work: fewer features chasing installs, more features chasing the moment between saving something and standing at the stove.

Saltpig was built on the idea that cooking, unlike scrolling, is a decision. Ten weeks in, the users still with us — steady, if not yet cooking as often as I'd like — are proof that the decision is one people want help making. The next stretch of work is making that decision easier to act on.

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