Every summer for the past eight years, I’ve been part of a cook crew for a youth movement. We’re usually with a group of around 130 persons with the primary school kids of KSA Izegem, the leaders and the chefs combined. With this group we have our yearly, seven-day camp. As you can imagine, cooking for a group of this size can take quite a bit of preparation work to setup the menu, guesstimate the necessary amounts and order all the ingredients.

Up till now we’ve maintained a semi-advanced excel file to enter a menu and retrieve automatic ingredient lists and amounts. Every year however we run into some small issues with this file or come up with ideas to improve upon our approach.

With some spare time last year, I decided to make an attempt to build something to improve upon what we had. By making it a platform the goal is also to enable other groups to share in the functionality and hopefully grow a community to help each other out. This resulted in a new website: kampkok.be.

In the initial version you can create recipes, manage your events and retrieve order lists for all ingredients. Based on the locations you want to fetch your ingredients, the system is also able to automatically define where ingredients for a given day should be bought.

Where can I find this

If you want to try it out, feel free to browse to kampkok.be. If you do try it out, please send some feedback my way.

Below you can also read a dutch article which was published in the quarterly KSA magazine. This interview has some additional context about the goals of the project and the future vision behind it.