Manifesto
It started because we couldn't eat together.
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 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 opposite. It's the record of what you ate.
Your meal isn't content. Choose Public or Friends Only when you post. It's a food diary — the kind that remembers what you'd otherwise forget.
The meal that stays with you in five years probably isn't the one everyone queued 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 beats the meal that trended. Makan is built around that.
A few things we won't do, because they'd defeat the point.
A meal isn't 4.2 out of 5.
No stars. No averages deciding what was good. The only ranking on Makan is your own: your meals, held up against each other, until the order is one you actually believe. Your #3 of all time might be the same dish your mum made for you as a kid. That means more than a 4.6 from people who weren't there.
Your feed isn't sorted by what's popular.
Your friends, in the order they posted. There's a public feed if you want to see past them, and it works the same way. Nothing jumps the queue for having more likes.
Restaurants can't pay their way into your feed.
If you see a place on Makan, it's because someone you know ate there and remembered it.
Your record is yours.
We hold it for you. You can delete it whenever you want.
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, 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 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 someone cooked for you properly. The breakfast you ate alone the morning after. The meal you cooked the first night in a new flat. Every meal 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
Back to Makan →