Our Story

We're a family that eats together.

We're Dutch, Japanese, and American. A multilingual household in California where dinner is the best part of the day. Ask our oldest how his day was and he won't tell you about school. He'll list every meal he had and rate his day accordingly.

We built KiWi because we had to.

Our oldest has severe food allergies. We tried every recipe app out there. None of them could keep him safe. They'd flag peanuts but miss the sesame hidden in a sauce, or label something "dairy-free" when it clearly wasn't. We needed ingredient-level safety we could actually trust.

Our middle son is on the spectrum and has a long list of textures and ingredients he avoids. Our youngest is a typical six-year-old with strong opinions about anything green. And the two of us? We love food from everywhere. Thai curries, Japanese home cooking, Dutch stamppot, California taco trucks. We needed one app that works for all five of us.

Our bookshelf told us the rest.

It's packed with Dutch, Japanese, and English cookbooks, and we don't speak each other's native languages. Half the recipes on our shelf were out of reach. We needed an app that could translate any recipe, instantly, so everyone can cook from any book in the house.

We may have gone a little overboard.

While it's fun as a data science enthusiast and software engineer to spend time on things like "Jaccard token similarity, Zipfian distribution, Fisher-Yates shuffle, Levenshtein distance, Haversine distance, and finite-state lookahead constraints for morphological false-positive prevention", we know that ultimately it's about creating a product that just works. For shopping, for meal planning, and for finding the best recipes for your family.

And the name? Kiwi is our oldest son's favorite fruit.