Evernote Food

» see evernote.com/food as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Evernote Food was announced at LeWeb in Paris on 7 December 2011, alongside Evernote Hello, as one of two small satellite apps orbiting the main notebook. Food's job was the meal. You photographed the plate and the app filed the photo into your Evernote account with the restaurant and the date already attached.

Version 2.0 arrived a year later and brought the iPad, along with a cookbook view for recipes you had clipped with the browser extension. A later update wired in OpenTable reservations and Foursquare ratings, which was the app at its most ambitious: a private log of everywhere you had eaten, searchable the way the rest of Evernote was searchable.

Then Instagram happened to it. Photographing food stopped being a note-taking activity and became a posting activity, and the audience for a private meal diary thinned while the audience for a public one went vertical. Evernote's own explanation, when it finally gave one, was that its main app and the Web Clipper were already good enough at saving recipes and photos.

I was not the user for this. Food's whole premise was that the plate in front of you was worth filing away, and by 2015 the people at my table who photographed dinner were posting it, not archiving it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Evernote in 2011 was in its expansion phase and building a suite. Food and Hello launched together and Skitch was acquired the same year, with Clearly and Peek following, and the pitch was that Evernote would be an external memory with a specialized front door for each kind of remembering.

Food got real design attention. It had a good camera flow and a genuinely nice cookbook layout, and reviewers in 2012 and 2013 treated it as one of the better-made apps in its category. Being well made was not the problem.

~ the culling ~

Phil Libin stepped down as CEO in July 2015 after nine years, and Chris O'Neill, out of Google, took the chair with a mandate to make the company focus. The post announcing Food's end went up on 26 August 2015 and gave the apps five weeks. On 30 September they stopped syncing with Evernote's servers and came out of the stores.

Skitch was cut on most of its platforms in January 2016, Clearly with it, and Evernote spent the years after that shrinking back toward the notebook it started as. Food is the clearest single marker of where the suite era stopped.

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