Could this French app help you not only shop better, but also cook and eat healthier?
The beginning of the school year changes lots of things, including the easy style of summer cooking. Kids are back in school and parents are back to focusing on work and, among other things, cooking. That means that deciding on what’s for dinner, shopping for all the ingredients and then preparing the meal can become a time-eating chore. Many enjoy being back in the groove of cooking but the planning and shopping parts are often a hassle.
Leave it to the French to find a solution. The free app Jow provides easy, organized meal planning and recipes that meet each user’s budget and then works with local grocery stores and delivery services to provide the right amount of food for specific times or events. The advantages are automatic selection of products using Jow’s uncomplicated recipes that meet selected requirements, ordering grocery amounts that don’t end up wasting food and easy grocery delivery or pickup. The Jow app also helps people eat better.
“We have found that if you don’t know how to do a recipe, even basic recipes, you don’t know what to buy or how to buy it,” said Jacques-Edouard Sabatier, Co-founder and CEO of Jow. “We help people buy the right things, eat easier, healthier, better … and at the best price. By better I mean choosing good products and making sure that they have a positive impact on the environment and the world.”
It starts with recipes that can be personalized to each user’s dietary restrictions. A customer creates an account and identifies food preferences along with household size and kitchen equipment. Jow then provides personalized menu and recipe recommendations. Once approved by the user, Jow connects with the customer’s online grocer account that are Jow partners. The grocer then takes over and delivers or provides pickup provisions for each customer.
Co-founder Jacques-Edouard Sabatier © Valerio GERACI
Customers are typically young families, according to Sabatier. Jow also has lots of young students, divorcees and seniors as customers. The company started in France in 2018/2019 and grew during the pandemic when people were required to stay at home. Online grocery shopping took off and has continued to grow. Jow partners with the top stores in France including Carrefour, Monoprix, Auchan, Leclerc, Intermarché and Chronodrive.
According to Brick Meets Click, US online grocery sales totaled $10 billion in July 2025, a 26% increase over the previous year. Jow entered the US market in 2022 and grocery store partners include H-E-B in Texas; The Kroger Company which has thousands of stores throughout the US such as Ralphs and Payless; and Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America that facilitates online shopping, delivery and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores. Jow currently has eight million users worldwide.
The idea for Jow started when Sabatier became a dad for the first time. He now has three kids and understands that the issues of weekly planning and shopping can be confusing and expensive when too much food is bought and goes to waste, an important recipe ingredient is forgotten or random products are bought because they looked appealing. In addition, unhealthy products are often purchased because reading the ingredients of a product isn’t a typical habit and can be confusing.
“Shopping for many of our customers is about family,” said Sabatier. “You must be way more organized. Ttere are constraints on budgets…and it’s also the moment when you are more cautious about food both for you and your kids. You don’t want to put bad things in your children’s plate so it’s a combination of less time, less money and being more cautious about food. This is what I experienced – I tried to do my grocery shopping using the existing mobile apps and it was a nightmare. Not because of the design of the app but because the user must find the product in each category and then find subcategories and sub-subcategories, along with quantities and weights, and put them in their cart.”
And that takes too long to shop. Sabatier wanted to find the efficiency and speed in using digital services but he also wanted to solve the problem that, even with a full fridge, there was still the question, “What’s for dinner tonight?” Out of that Jow was born.
The hardest process for Jow is to develop shoppable recipes that accurately include the food amount and style while matching users’ food requirements. For example, a chicken filet recipe requires full chicken filets for each user while a chicken salad requires chicken filet that is cut in pieces. That’s a different count for the number of filets required, not just a weight count. Or spinach that can be bought frozen or fresh and cooks very differently. Fresh spinach cooks down to a much smaller amount while the weight for frozen is printed on the package. Buying the amount needed for the recipe can be confusing. According to Sabatier, product amounts for recipes work 80% of the time, but the other 20% can be tricky.
So Jow developed simple and efficient recipes for weekly family meals that don’t require a lot of ingredients or use a lot of kitchen equipment. While a special recipe for a weekend dinner party can be added to the shopping list, Jow focuses on high quality, simple recipes. Jow also works at getting the best prices for customers based on buying the exact amounts needed and special prices from their grocery partners.
“We quickly understood that if we wanted our products to be adapted, we had to be super focused around one element: making sure our recipes were super simple,” said Sabatier. “Users choose recipes only by Jow for Jow and we have guidelines to make the recipes simple and smart.”
Jow’s recipes include make-ahead dinners, lunchbox packable meals for kids and no-cook meals when cooking is just a chore. Sample recipe selections include umami veggie pasta, paprika chicken skewers with salad and pita bread, and everything seasoning crusted salmon with cucumber salad. There are also meals for the back-to-school season that include easy breakfasts such as pumpkin spice overnight oats, dinners such as veggie packed mac and cheese and deserts like s’mores brownies. Users just click the “add” button and the food is included on the shopping list. New recipes are introduced each week.
With success in France, Jow started services in the US and it was like starting from scratch again, according to Sabatier. Unlike France, which has 5 or 6 supermarkets found throughout the country, there were many more supermarkets to reach out to in the US. But there are also many food delivery companies such as Instacart that made the process easier, plus pickup at grocery stores is much more convenient and does not require a delivery charge. The first state for Jow to enter was Texas, but is now available throughout the US.
“Jow is really a cooking coach,” said Sabatier. “If you don’t know how to cook you don’t know how to shop. You don’t know what to buy and how to buy it. We help people buy the right things and eat better.”
According to Sabatier, the favourite recipe in the US is creamy pasta with zucchini. The favorite recipe in France is quiche lorraine. C’est classique!
Lead photo credit : Food_Quick-cheesy-crunchwrap_EN_LOGO
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Dining and Cooking