One of the things I enjoy most each morning is checking the Cook'n Elf Dashboard to see how many recipes our community Captured, Scanned, etc. the day before.

These days, Cook'n users are Capturing thousands of internet recipes and Scanning hundreds of recipe images every single day. It's exciting to watch because every Scan teaches the Cook'n Elves something new.

Of course, not every recipe scans perfectly. Each day, a handful of recipe images fail. Rather than wondering why, I asked one of our Cook'n Elves to build a little feature that automatically emails me every recipe that doesn't scan correctly.

After looking through dozens of these "failed" scans, I noticed something surprising...

Here are some examples...do you see the common factor among all these failed scans?

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About 90% of them weren't actually EI (Elf Intelligence) failures at all. The recipe image simply didn't include any directions!

Originally, we instructed the Elf Intelligence (EI) to never invent recipe directions. If the directions weren't visible in the image, the scan would fail rather than risk making something up.

But after seeing so many recipes like this, we realized we could do better.

Now, when a recipe doesn't include any directions at all, we've given the Cook'n Elves a little more freedom. They'll use the ingredients, the recipe title, and their culinary knowledge to create reasonable preparation steps so you end up with a complete recipe instead of an error.

That simple change has dramatically improved the success rate of recipe scanning.

"What about the other 10%?" you might ask.

Well...sometimes we receive images like this...



Unfortunately, the Cook'n Elves haven't figured out how to reverse-engineer Grandma's secret recipe from a picture of the finished dish...

They're good...
...but they're not that good. 😂

If you haven't tried Magic Scan recently, give it try. We're improving it every single day based on real recipes submitted by Cook'n users just like you. It just keeps getting better and better!

    Dan Oaks
    Founder of DVO Enterprises
    Creator of Cook'n
    Grandfather of 5. Father of 5. Husband of 1.
    Monthly Newsletter Contributor since 2024
    Email the author! dan@dvo.com