Cookwala strategy: message, product, website, docs, developer experience

Status: revised 2026-10-04 (v2). Covers the mission, vision, story, standard, website, documentation, API and SDK, demos, community and metrics. It builds on the action plan (ACTION-PLAN.md), the backstory and gap list (research/BACKSTORY.md), the architecture review (research/ARCHITECTURE-REVIEW.md), the 23-site benchmark (research/WEB-BENCHMARK.md), the stakeholder design (STAKEHOLDERS.md) and the messaging rules (MESSAGING.md). Section 1's table is the first-pass study; the benchmark supersedes it where they differ.

0. Summary #

Cookwala's job. It is the open way to tell any kitchen (a person, a food bank, an oven or a humanoid robot) what to make, when each step is done, and what must never happen, and to check all three on the device.

What changes:

1. Message. Retire "the world's first and largest robot cooking recipes index and CLI" and lead with the problem every robot maker and kitchen has. New one-liner: "The open standard for cooking safely: people, kitchens and robots."
2. Story. Robots are about to cook in homes, but nobody has written down, in a form a machine can check, what "done" and "safe" mean, or in which cuisines. Cookwala started from one family's Egyptian recipes. Its mission is to teach machines every cuisine safely, and to make sure good food reaches people.
3. Proof before promise. Live, real counters. Now / next / later labels. Published critiques.
4. One loop everyone understands: Describe → Check → Cook → Learn.
5. Paths by audience: device makers, AI-agent builders, kitchens and food banks, cooks, researchers.
6. Code and a live demo on the first screen. In-browser dry run ("Can this device cook this recipe?"), the simulators, and copy-paste commands that work today.
7. Developer experience at the level of the best AI and robotics docs: a 5-minute quickstart, docs organized as tutorials, how-to guides, reference and explanation, llms.txt, copy-page, a Python package and CLI, a typed JS/TS SDK, an MCP server, a reference hub you can run locally, a ROS 2 package, and a LeRobot bridge.
8. A contributor network (inspired by Figure's Index): cooks and kitchens contribute consented recordings of real recipes, so robots learn every cuisine, with credit to the people who taught them.

1. What we learned #

Patterns shared by the best:

1. One sentence of who it's for and what it does.
2. A loop the reader recognizes.
3. Working code or a demo within one scroll.
4. Pick-your-path entry points.
5. Proof (numbers, users, governance).
6. Honest status (trust center, status page, now/next).
7. Community you can join today.
8. Docs built for both people and AI readers (copy page, llms.txt, "Ask AI").

2. Cookwala today #

Strengths:

• A rare, concrete idea: physical operation envelopes, sensor ladders, refusal instead of guessing, safety enforced on the device, verifiable documents.
• Conformance vectors that include two independent standards results (RFC 8785, RFC 8032).
• Four playable simulators.
• A humanitarian profile that works without robots.
• A real recipe corpus (fifi.cooking) and a region with an identity (Egypt, the Arab world).
• An unusually honest critique-and-response record.

Gaps:

3. Positioning and message #

3.1 Category and one-liner #

• Category: an open standard (with free tools and an index) for executable, verifiable cooking.
• One-liner: Cookwala is the open standard for cooking safely: people, kitchens and robots.
• Triad, used everywhere:
  • What to make. Recipes as steps a machine can plan.
  • When it's done. Measurable end conditions: temperatures, food-state cues, times.
  • What must never happen. Safety limits the device enforces itself.

3.2 Mission and vision (revised) #

• Mission: Help everyone eat well, safely, affordably and without waste, whoever does the cooking.
• Vision: Any kitchen on Earth can cook any recipe safely, and good food reaches people instead of the bin.
• Why the change: "end world hunger" stays as the long-term reason, told with evidence. Cookwala contributes to it through less waste, food rescue and cheaper cooking, alongside the programs, funding and policy that hunger needs.

3.3 The story #

Home robots are arriving: Figure 03, 1X NEO and kitchen robots are shipping or taking orders. They are learning to move, but nobody has written down, in a way a machine can check, what "simmer" means, when chicken is safe, or how a grandmother's molokhia is made. Each maker writes its own closed recipes, mostly from a few cuisines.

Cookwala started from one family's Egyptian home recipes on fifi.cooking and asked a simple question: how do you hand a recipe to a machine, and know it will cook it safely?

The answer is an open standard. It says what to make, when each step is done, and what must never happen. The device checks it before it heats anything up, and refuses rather than guesses. The same recipes work for people and food banks today, and they will let robots learn every cuisine on Earth tomorrow, with credit to the cooks who taught them.

(The founder should confirm and personalize the origin sentence. Authentic beats polished.)

3.4 Message house #

3.5 Language rules #

• Use: recipe, step, done, safe, check, refuse, kitchen, cook, open, verify, consent.
• Avoid: "revolutionary", "first and largest" (until true), "end hunger" (as a headline), "AI-powered" (vague).
• Label every number as measured, modelled or assumed.
• Say "now / next / later" instead of implying something exists when it doesn't.

4. Audiences and their first success #

5. Product architecture: what Cookwala offers #

6. Website #

6.1 Sitemap #

/                 Home: one sentence, triad, live dry run, pathfinder, loop, proof, now/next/later
/why/             Why Cookwala: the problem, the story, the three goals told honestly
/impact/          Hunger, health, environment, economy, culture; every number labelled; what we don't know
/for/<group>/     One page per stakeholder group (developers, companies, providers, food, humanitarian,
                  health, education, government, capital, thought, everyone): message, options, first
                  success, flow, how it advances their work and society
/developers/      Quickstart, docs, API reference, SDKs, CLI, conformance, bindings, evals
/docs/            Documentation (rendered pages; /docs/?p=NAME keeps working)
/playground/      Live dry run with a device builder and shareable results, envelope explorer, simulators explained
/sim/...          Home, city, country, world simulators (unchanged URLs)
/registry/        Browse recipes, devices, rule packs, extensions, benchmarks; publish flow; directory of organizations (empty-state ready)
/humanitarian/    Food banks and kitchens: profile, SMS walkthrough, four flows, pilot protocol, concept note
/farmers/         Surplus by SMS; fair signals (next, after counsel review)
/education/       Lesson kit, research topics, open problems
/policy/          Brief and model language
/investors/       Opportunity, timing, business model, roadmap, risks, governance; no financial promises
/whitepaper/      Web and PDF
/deck/            12 to 15 slides, keyboard-navigable, shareable
/ideas/           Essays for thinkers
/trust/           Safety, privacy, security, governance, critiques, conformance, status
/roadmap/         Now / next / later with a status on every item
/contribute/      RFCs, translation, vectors, recipes, reviews; community; contact
/ar/...           Every page above in Arabic, right-to-left
/.well-known/     cookwala.json, security.txt · /llms.txt · /v1/...

6.2 Home page, top to bottom #

6.3 Design direction #

• Feel: calm, precise, warm. A professional instrument with a kitchen soul.
• Type: a precise grotesque for UI and a mono face for data and code. Large, light display type for the hero (borrowing Figure's confidence), without copying its cinematic darkness.
• Colour: neutral paper and ink with one heat accent (ember orange) that also marks temperature data. The palette is validated for colour-blind readers, and both light and dark themes are designed.
• Imagery: real hands and real home kitchens once we have them, never stock robots. Until then, diagrams and the live demo carry the page.
• Motion: one moment, the step-by-step dry run. Everything else is still.
• Bilingual from the start: English and Arabic (right-to-left layout), then others.
• Accessibility: WCAG 2.2 AA; keyboard; reduced motion; no information by colour alone.

6.4 Interactivity #

1. In-browser dry run (recipe × device).
2. Envelope explorer: drag a temperature trace and see when it leaves "simmer".
3. Simulators, with the protocol on and off.
4. Recipe step viewer: a step's sentence, its JSON and its envelope side by side.
5. Later: a recipe editor that validates as you type.

7. Documentation #

Organized by the Diátaxis framework, so each page has one job:

Docs ergonomics:

• left navigation, search, "Copy page", "Edit on GitHub", previous/next links;
• language tabs (Python / JavaScript / cURL / CLI);
• llms.txt and per-page markdown for AI readers;
• a cheat sheet and a common-problems page;
• a changelog with dates.

8. API and SDK #

9. Demos #

10. Community and growth #

• Contributor network (inspired by Figure's Index):
  • Cooks record consented sessions of recipes they know, with credit on every recipe and dataset card.
  • Kitchens and food banks pilot.
  • Makers implement devices.
  • Reviewers review rule packs and envelopes.
  • Translators translate steps and vocabulary.
  • Paid contributions come later, funded by grants. Never pay for data without informed consent and fair terms.
• Rituals: monthly community call; quarterly "state of Cookwala" with real numbers; public review threads.
• Partnership sequence: the first ten from the stakeholder tracker (food bank, WFP Innovation Accelerator, Home Assistant, a device startup, a university lab, a certifier, World Central Kitchen, a foundation, a neutral home, one creator).
• Channels: GitHub Discussions, a newsletter, conference talks (ROSCon, IROS/ICRA workshops, food-tech events), Arabic-language channels.

11. Metrics #

• North-star metric: verified cooks, the number of executions that ran a signed Cookwala recipe end to end with a consented, conforming log. While that is zero, track leading indicators.

12. Roadmap #

The maintained roadmap with a status per item is [ROADMAP.md](ROADMAP.md). The table below is the original 180-day plan, kept for the record.

13. Risks to this strategy #