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» see menus-recipe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Tokyo Electron Device is a semiconductor and electronic-components distributor in Yokohama. On 30 July 2013 it announced a web application that proposed meals. The recipes were licensed from Better Home, a long-running Japanese cooking school, and the company's own release is unusually clear about where the work was being done: the computer builds the meal, and it carries the nutrition arithmetic through to the end. It claimed 1.5 million meals already available and, in theory, several hundred trillion possible combinations.

An iPhone app followed the next day and Android in March 2014. By August 2014 ohganic had sixty thousand registered users and had learned a new trick, a push notification that watched which meals you liked and worked out your taste from your own use of the app. That was the only machine learning the product ever had, and Tokyo Electron Device shipped it a little over a year after launch.

Then the distributor stopped. Reviews on the Android listing from late 2017 complain about a closure announced for the end of the year, one of them pointing out that the app carried no advertising at all and asking why it had not simply been made paid. DMM bought the business on 24 January 2018. The reviews from that week read like a welcome-home party.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the computer actually did ~

There was no image recognition in it at any point, and nothing in the app looked at a photograph of your food. What sat under MENUS was a constraint solver over a fixed catalog plus a nutrition calculator: you declared sex, weight, a calorie target it could work out for you, allergies, how long you were prepared to cook, foods you disliked, what was left in the fridge, and which cuisine you felt like, and it returned a whole meal rather than one dish. That last part was a deliberate decision, stated in DMM's own release: the point was not picking a dish and building around it, the point was minimizing how much thinking and choosing you had to do.

The health goals are where it stops being portable. Alongside blood pressure and diabetes you could ask the app to aim at 美肌 for your skin, at anemia prevention, at swelling, or at 冷え症, a sensitivity to cold that is a recognized complaint in Japanese clinical practice and barely a category anywhere else. I had to look up two of those four to write this paragraph.

~ the dietitian who signed off once ~

DMM's marketing promoted the catalog as supervised by registered dietitians, and the Japanese encyclopedia entry has turned that into a claim that the app was trying to turn a dietitian into an AI. Tokyo Electron Device never used the word dietitian at all: its recipes came from cooking-school instructors, which is a different profession. The supervision was a one-time sign-off on a recipe database, not a person in the loop when the app chose your Tuesday. The nearest DMM came to the encyclopedia's version was in June 2019, when it sold the engine as a service to a site run by the footballer Yuto Nagatomo and described the work as converting one named chef's menu-planning knowledge into AI. That sentence describes an expert system accurately and anything else badly.

~ the award and the notice ~

Four million meal combinations, 800,000 downloads by November 2018, 1.4 million by December 2019, a Premium tier at 450 yen a month, and a Google Play Best of 2019 prize in the hidden-gems category. The last app updates landed on 3 and 13 April 2020. The TLS certificate for the domain was issued on 3 March 2020 and never renewed.

The notice appeared on 27 April 2020 and closed Premium signups that same day, with everything else ending on 30 June and every account deleted on 1 July. The reason is more candid than most: stable provision from here was difficult, and the company had considered the usage. Google had given it a prize the previous December. menus-recipe.com has no working DNS now, and ohganic.com is for sale.

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