A friend gifted me a few hellofresh boxes once and I quite liked the recipes. But I don’t care about subscription services to get overpriced groceries delivered if the supermarket is a 5 minutes walk away.
Is there any collection on the recipes online? At least in Germany, recipes aren’t even copyrighted, so it wouldn’t even be illegal to distribute them here (AFAIK, IANAL).
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They literally just publish them on their website. https://www.hellofresh.com/eat/top-recipes
Fun fact about recipes: they are not copyrightable.
So you can’t “pirate” them unless they put them behind a paywall, and even then you can download and reshare them.
I absolutely hate that Basics with Babish put his recipes behind a paywall.
Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).
But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.
And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.
But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.
But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.
If you don’t mind them auf Englisch, I’ve got a hoard of them and time with a duplex scanner.
I sure don’t mind them in english. Would be really neat if you’d share them. (:
I’ve done less useful things with a Monday morning before. PDFs, and I will try to suss a way to set the file names programatically.
A handful may come with ‘pre-printed accidents’ but all will be legible :)
As long as the scanner can handle the slightly thicker paper stock they use, we should be golden.
I’m still wondering if there’s a place where to communally share these recipes, other than importing them on some big recipe platform.
Python, Tesseract, OpenAI and my 3 remaining brain cells have now combined to form a working script that will rename the scan file names to whatever it reads in a certain section of the card.
Doing them by hand would be a nightmare 😅
Wow, someone needed a project. ;)
Thanks a lot, seriously! ^^
Has gone suprisingly well.
Tesseract failed in some places, making some of the sub-headings come out in what looks like Klingon. HF have varied their paper stock dimensions as well, which caused a few things to be clipped.
Acceptable output for manual corrections.
Preview:
Expect a DM soon-ish.
