Manifesto
You'll forget today's best meal by Friday. Makan won't.
Makan started during COVID. I couldn't see my friends, so a few of us started a Snapchat story to stay in touch. We'd post photos of dinner, breakfast, takeout, whatever we were eating. It grew to over 300 people without us trying. When you can't share a table, the photo of the meal kind of becomes the table.
That was six years ago. We've sent each other thousands of meals since. At some point it stopped feeling like a story and started feeling like a record. So we built an app around it.
Most food apps are about deciding where to eat next. They rank restaurants. They score them. They take a thousand strangers' opinions and turn them into one number out of five, and once you've eaten, they ask you to do the same. A year goes by, you've got a list of places you went to, and you cannot for the life of you remember what you ate at any of them.
Makan is the other thing. It's the record of what you ate.
Your meal isn't content. Only your friends see it unless you say otherwise. It's a food diary, basically. The kind that remembers what you'd otherwise forget.
Here's the thing that gets me. The meal that stays with you in five years probably isn't the one everyone was queuing for this week. Maybe it's a dinner you made at 11pm last Tuesday. Maybe it's a small restaurant nobody else seems to know about. The meal that mattered always beats the meal that trended. Makan is built around that.
A few things we won't do, because they'd defeat the point.
No star ratings. No averages from strangers.
A meal isn't 4.2 out of 5. The rankings we show are personal. Yours, and your friends'. When a friend posts a meal, you'll see if it's their #3 of all time, no matter where they ate it. That tells you more than a 4.6 average from strangers ever could.
Your home feed isn't sorted by what's popular.
It's your friends, in the order their meals happened. Nothing jumps to the top just because it has more likes.
Restaurants can't pay to be in your feed.
If you see a place on Makan, it's because someone you know actually ate there and remembered it.
Your record is yours.
We hold it for you. You can delete it whenever. If Makan ever shuts down, we'll send you your record before we go.
And one more, that matters more every year.
AI has never tasted food.
It can't smell, can't chew, can't remember being hungry as a kid. So it won't write your meals on Makan, generate your recipes, or guess what you ate from a photo. The point of remembering what you ate is that you tasted it. AI never has.
What Makan does do is help you remember how you've eaten. The Tuesday night dinner. The long lunch in Lisbon that ran four hours. The kebab at 2am after you got home. The first time your kid cooked you something. The breakfast you ate alone the morning after. The meal you cooked the first night in a new flat. Every meal gets saved with what was happening around it. What you ate. Who was with you.
You remember who was at the table. You can never remember what you actually ate. That's the gap Makan fills.
If you've ever tried to remember a meal and couldn't, you'll get it.
— Devon
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