GoodieYum didn’t start as a recipe idea. It started as a systems problem.
Meals, for most people, are a point of friction: too expensive, too time-consuming, too improvisational, too dependent on cognitive load at the exact time of day when most people have none left.
But underneath that chaos is a solvable pattern — a pattern with constraints, inputs, cost ceilings, variability ranges, and failure modes. In other words:
a system architecture problem disguised as a household task.
GoodieYum is my attempt to design a meal-planning system that behaves more like an engineered workflow than a series of last-minute guesses. The goal is straightforward:
- Use real weekly grocery sale data as the foundational constraint
- Build complete, balanced dinners — not loosely assembled “recipes”
- Deliver consistency: most dinners target ≈$15 for four servings
- Eliminate waste by designing across the entire week, not per night
This build log is where I document the internal logic of that system.
It is not a lifestyle blog.
It is not a “what I cooked this week.”
It is not a mood board.
It is the architectural record of GoodieYum — the principles, decision rules, constraints, heuristics, versions, and stability layers that shape how this system works and why it works.
Over this series, I’ll walk through:
• The core problem GoodieYum is designed to solve
Why weeknight dinners consistently fail people, and why the problem isn’t cooking — it’s design.
• How constraints create structure
The cost ceiling, the single-protein rule, minimizing ingredient branching, eliminating pantry bloat, and using sale anchors as the weekly backbone.
• The meal model architecture
Why GoodieYum treats dinners as structured objects with known components, not recipes with narrative flourishes.
• The sale-flyer data model
How a disorganized promotional flyer becomes a structured dataset that governs the week’s meals.
• The $15 Dinner Engine
A cost-driven combinatorial logic that identifies what meals are possible within budget.
• Quality control: Stability Layer v1.8.1
The ruleset that ensures meals are feasible, repeatable, substitution-friendly, and resistant to waste.
• AI as a subsystem, not the architect
Where AI supports the system — and where human judgment is non-negotiable.
• The roadmap
Where GoodieYum is going next as a platform, and where the constraints evolve.
This log is part documentation, part portfolio, part personal challenge.
It captures how I think: structured, constraint-driven, architected, and always with an eye toward simplifying the lives of real people who need dinner on the table without chaos.
This is GoodieYum, from the inside.
Welcome to the log.
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