Fast, fresh, tasty and kind of awesome

On Thursday night, our old bowl­ing league arch nemisisisis bud­dies Click­Suite  launched a new iPhone and iPad app called Fast, Fresh and Tasty. We went along because we were prom­ised food and drink, and you know how good that is at get­ting us to leave our houses, but we were pleas­antly sur­prised by the app itself.

Fast, Fresh and Tasty is not just anoth­er recipe app. Yes, it has over 100 recipes in it, but where the attrac­tion lies is in the fresh­ness. It knows what sea­son it is, and what’s good to eat right now – did you know that Spring is not only a great time for asparagus (duh!) but also cer­tain types of fish? Now you know! Or at least you’ll know when you down­load the app. Yes, at $6.50, it’s not the cheapest app ever. But how much do cook­books cost nor­mally? Exactly. PLUS! Just like Angry Birds Sea­son­al, there will be free sea­son­al updates, so in winter you can warm yourselves with cur­ries and soups.

The bit that really wowed us about the app though was the shop­ping list fea­ture – you can add all the ingredi­ents you need to your shop­ping list and then eas­ily email or tweet that list to someone else. Believe me friends, I will be using this fea­ture next time I offer to cook for you.

You might be won­der­ing what the value pro­pos­i­tion is for a web design com­pany to make an app like this. Well, they’ve partnered with a num­ber of food com­pan­ies like Sil­ver Fern Farms, Ran­gitikei Chick­en, the Sea­food Industry Coun­cil and Alfa One Rice Bran Oil (thanks Idea­log art­icle for provid­ing me with that list!). It’s a mod­el that can be trans­ferred pretty eas­ily to oth­er coun­tries or areas, and we like that a lot. This is exactly the kind of awe­some export that Wel­ling­ton should be pro­du­cing.

Plus, can we just spend a little bit of time talk­ing about how fuck­ing awe­some  Bettys [sic] is as a launch ven­ue? So slick with their image pro­jec­tions, and the ser­vice is superb and the drinks deli­cious. The food was made to recipes from Fast, Fresh & Tasty, but presen­ted with a little extra ingenu­ity (fresh asparagus and aioli served in cucum­ber cups), and our glassses were kept admir­ably full. Very impress­ive stuff.

So, to sum­mar­ise: this app looks awe­some, and Bettys is great. You should be pat­ron­ising both.