AnoUlam has recipe suggestions, grocery lists, and price tracking.
For many Filipinos, the daily question of “Ano ulam?” can take almost as much effort as preparing the meal itself.
Filipino developer Patrick Gabriel Pascual hopes to ease that familiar dilemma through AnoUlam, a web-based app that recommends meals based on a user’s budget or the ingredients already in their pantry.
A senior frontend engineer who prepares most of his own meals, Pascual told radar that he often found himself jumping between recipe websites and food delivery apps—only to spend nearly half an hour deciding what to eat.
“I wasn’t just asking myself, ‘Ano ulam?’ I was also wondering, ‘Kasya ba sa budget?,’ Ano puwede lutuin?,’ and ‘Pasok ba ‘to sa macro goals?’” Pascual said. “The problem wasn’t that I had no options. It was that I had too many.”
The realization pushed him to turn the idea into a project during Holy Week this year. He began developing AnoUlam on April 11 and launched its first public version on May 17.
“The main goal was simple: to help people reduce the mental effort of deciding what to eat or cook,” Pascual said. “I also wanted to introduce macro awareness by providing estimated nutritional information to help users make more informed meal decisions.”
AnoUlam lets users choose between Budget Mode and Pantry Mode. Budget Mode recommends meals based on a user’s funds and desired number of servings, while Pantry Mode suggests recipes using ingredients already available at home.
Each recommendation includes an estimated cost, estimated nutritional information, ingredients, and step-by-step cooking instructions. Users can also save the recipes they like, allowing the app to automatically generate a corresponding grocery list.
The web app also features Price Watch, which uses data from the Department of Agriculture’s weekly price monitoring across 30 public markets across Metro Manila. Aside from displaying ingredient prices, the feature also highlights recipes that use ingredients whose prices have recently dropped.
AnoUlam also uses AI tools as part of its process for generating and validating recipes, estimated prices, and nutritional information. Pascual then manually reviews the recommendations against established recipe references and publicly available nutrition data before they are published.
According to Pascual, AnoUlam will continue to evolve based on user feedback, with improvements focused on its recommendation engine, recipe collection, and community experience.
While a native mobile app is already on the roadmap, Pascual said he intentionally launched AnoUlam as a web app first to quickly refine the user experience.
“That will help ensure the mobile app is built around features people truly find valuable,” he added.
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