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Heilsa

Heilsa and asking an AI chatbot

A chatbot can suggest dinner. It cannot know what is in your fridge, and it cannot put anything on your shopping list.

The Recipes tab: a card explaining how to save recipes from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, websites and photos, above a recipe card for Mushroom and Spinach Scramble marked Can make now.
A recipe page for Sticky Gochujang Chicken: its picture, 35 minutes, serves 4, dairy-free and gluten-free, about 685 kcal a serving with protein, carbs and fat, an Add to plan button and its allergens.

What AI chatbots do well

  • Genuinely good at ideas, substitutions, and technique questions.
  • No setup at all, which matters more than it sounds.
  • Flexible in a way no structured app can match.

Where they stop

  • It has no reliable pantry state, so you have to describe your kitchen every time.
  • Nothing it produces is shared with the other person in your household.
  • Suggestions do not become actions. Nothing lands on a list or updates anything.

What Heilsa does instead

  • AI is used where it removes friction: reading a recipe out of a reel, a page or a photo, or the foods out of what you say at the fridge.
  • Every recipe it reads is a draft until someone in the household has checked it.
  • The output is household state, not a message you have to act on yourself.

AI as leverage, not as a character

Heilsa has no chat surface and no assistant persona. AI appears at the point where a household is doing something tedious, such as copying a recipe out of a video, and disappears again. Treating it as a feature rather than a personality is a deliberate choice.

Review before save, always

A recipe Heilsa has read waits as a draft you check, edit or throw away. Shared household data is only worth having if it is trustworthy, and that means a person confirms what goes in.

In the app

Where to look in Heilsa.

  • The Pantry wall: 49 foods at home, each a drawing with its name. A Use soon shelf at the top holds banana and chicken thigh, both today, and the leftover curry is under Made at home.

    Pantry wall

    A pantry that tells you what to use first

    Every food at home on one wall, each with its own drawing, and a Use soon shelf on top for whatever has the least time left.

    Pantry wall in detail
  • The sheet for adding a dinner to Monday: leftovers from Sunday first, then Potato and Cheddar Frittata (you have everything for it) and two curries each missing one spice.

    Meal planning

    Dinner plans that start from the fridge

    Plan up to a fortnight of dinners. Heilsa ranks the choices by what needs using and what you already have, and leaves the deciding to you.

    Meal planning in detail
  • The Shopping tab grouped by recipe: basil, gnocchi and mascarpone for Creamy Tomato Gnocchi, salmon for the Lemon Salmon Traybake, curry powder for the prawn curry, and two items added by hand.

    Shopping list

    A shopping list that writes itself

    Plan a dinner and what it needs, minus what is already home, goes on the shared list. Tick it in the shop and it is in the pantry.

    Shopping list in detail

Questions

Plain answers.

Is there a chatbot in Heilsa?
No. AI reads recipes you share or photograph into drafts, picks out the foods when you say what is in your fridge, and draws pictures for recipes that have none. Heilsa asks before anything goes to an AI service, and you can change your answer in the You tab, under Use AI. There is no open-ended chat surface, and there are no AI answers about nutrition or health.

Other comparisons

Try it with your own kitchen

Heilsa comes to the App Store in November. Join now, through TestFlight, and your household keeps it free through 2027.

Install with TestFlight

iPhone with iOS 15.1 or later, in the UK and Switzerland. Somewhere else?