Watermelon Pie, a social recipe sharing community, launches to make cooking more collaborative and more fun

The tech startup based in mid-coast Maine launched to help home cooks collect, evolve and share their recipe collections with family, friends and their local food community

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

12/04/2024 - Watermelon Pie launched on November 21, 2024 and it is a digital community for home cooks, community organizations and food businesses to collect and share recipes and discuss cooking and food in general. Kachina Miller, founder and CEO of Watermelon Pie, built Watermelon Pie to solve her own recipe chaos challenges.

The Story of Watermelon Pie

After over a decade in corporate America redesigning processes and leading digital transformation projects, founder and CEO Kachina Miller of Belfast, Maine realized that the real process bottleneck in her life was her other job - home cook for her busy family. Even with spreadsheets for meal plans, cooking notebooks, bookmarked websites and a giant pile of cookbooks, managing to put a hot, healthy, affordable meal on the table every night felt like a daunting task. While earning an MS from NYU in Management of Technology and Innovation, Kachina was so inspired by the entrepreneurial community that she decided to pursue her own dream of a technology that would make it easy to keep track of her recipes, her recipe adaptations and where she could share easily with friends and gain cooking inspiration from other real home cooks.

Kachina teamed up with technical cofounder Rakesh Kumar, a former colleague of who leads a dedicated development team in India, and with grant funding from the Maine Technology Institute the team built and tested a prototype and used the feedback to design and build Watermelon Pie, launched last month.

Watermelon Pie also participated in NYU’s Startup Boot Camp in 2023, Maine Center for Entrepreneur’s Top Gun and FoodTech programs in 2024.

The name Watermelon Pie came from a frequently-requested recipe for Watermelon Pie that Kachina had created — but it was just a bunch of scribbles in her cooking notebook, and the need for a digital home for the special recipe became clear. The recipe for Watermelon Pie can be found on the platform.

While the platform has just launched, Watermelon Pie already has a great inventory of recipes, including recipes added by amazing Maine businesses such as Wyman’s, The Blue Hill Co-op and Bahner Farm. New users and businesses are joining daily and starting their recipe collections. Join today by visiting www.watermelonpie.com to create your free profile.

December Promotion with Preble Street

At Watermelon Pie, we believe that feeding others is a universal act of care and kindness, and what better way to spread even more home-cooking love this holiday season than feeding someone in need. Starting today and for the entire month of December, Watermelon Pie will be donating a meal to Preble Street's Food Security Hub for every recipe shared on Watermelon Pie.

 
Preble Street’s Food Security Hub is a sustainable, comprehensive, and collaborative approach dedicated to ending hunger in Maine. The Food Security Hub uses a production and delivery model to address food insecurity, employing one central location, where multiple organizations can address food access and food justice in creative ways under the same roof.

The Food Security Hub currently serves 26 towns in southern Maine and prepares up to 2,000 hot nourishing meals per day. Once complete, the Preble Street Food Security Hub will be able to serve up to 10,000 meals a day, with a freezer capacity of 50,000 prepared meals, bolstering Maine’s resiliency against statewide emergencies.

In addition to its Food Security Hub, Preble Street operates low-barrier programs throughout Maine providing 24/365 services for individuals and families, including homeless youth, women, Veterans, and survivors of human trafficking, driven by its mission to meet urgent needs, empower people to move beyond the crises in their lives, and advocate for solutions to homelessness, hunger, and poverty. In February 2025, Preble Street will assume operations of Bangor's Hope House, Bangor’s largest emergency shelter and Maine’s only low-barrier shelter north of Waterville.

We are so inspired by the amazing work that Preble Street is doing, and what better way to give back to our community than to make it easy for home cooks to spread even more joy this holiday season. For every new recipe shared to Watermelon Pie in the month of December, Watermelon Pie will donate a meal to Preble Street.

Join Watermelon Pie today to start sharing your favorite recipes and support the amazing work of Preble Street.

Product Details:

Watermelon Pie is a web application accessible from a browser on any device and includes a social feed similar to Instagram for posting recipes, asking for recipe recommendations and sharing your latest culinary creations. It also includes recipe libraries where users can add a link to a favorite online recipe or upload their own recipe. Users can follow other home cooks and businesses and browse for new recipes. These features are just the beginning. The Watermelon Pie team will continue to develop and grow the features, eventually including meal-planning and shopping list capabilities, groups and event planning for potlucks and dinners, and an AI-enabled cooking assistant that can help make personalized recommendations and recipe adjustments to account for ingredients on hand and dietary requirements. The platform is free to use but will eventually also offer a paid subscription for premium features and premium recipe content.

Use cases:

Join Watermelon Pie as a home cook to:

Save and edit your favorite recipes
Find Cooking inspiration
Connect with your local food community
Share your cooking successes and misadventures

Join Watermelon Pie as a food or beverage business to:

Build brand recognition and loyalty
Share cooking inspiration with a community of home cooks
Join the cooking conversation
Connect directly with potential customers

 
Quotes:

“There is value in the knowledge of the home cook, and we are on a mission to make it easy to capture, organize and share this knowledge. It can be as simple as your family’s favorite easy weeknight meal, your spin on a classic dish or even as simple as what you are putting in your kids’ lunch these days. Others value this knowledge, and we are delighted that our users are as excited as we are to see what real home cooks are making.”

- Kachina Miller, Founder/CEO

Customer quotes:

“Easy to use and has some great core features. Fun to see what others are cooking.”

“Fun to see what people I know cook - I can't wait to get more friends and family on it!”

“I love being able to see recipes from friends and save the recipes for easy reference later!”

“The variety of recipes is already fantastic! It's fun to explore.”

Media Contact:

Kachina Miller, Founder/CEO, 207-322-4882, kachinamiller@watermelonpie.com