Even when it’s in season, watermelon is not your typical pie filling.
But that didn’t stop Kachina Miller, a home cook from Belfast, from devising a watermelon pie. After many failed attempts, she eventually produced a dessert recipe that involved mixing the fruit with mint, lime juice, condensed coconut milk and gelatin, then letting it cool off in a graham cracker crust and serving with whipped cream.
Now, after Miller says that she received many requests for the unorthodox summer pastry recipe that she had initially scribbled into a notebook, she has gone a step further: She has just launched a website called Watermelon Pie that specifically allows home cooks to collect and share their recipes with each other.
The eponymous watermelon pie is one of the many recipes that’s on there.
“I love to cook, and I was very frustrated that there wasn’t a better way for me to keep track of my favorite recipes, easily share them with my friends and family,” Miller said. “I was always texting recipes to friends, but then I couldn’t find the recipes that they sent me. I felt like, ‘Why isn’t anybody creating a ubiquitous cooking community that that will do all of these things?’”
While the site includes some features that home cooks might already prize from apps such as Instagram and Pinterest, Miller says that it’s unique in part because it’s more narrowly focused on cooking recipes than those other general interest platforms.
Registered users of the free platform can share, find, and store their recipes, as well as browse and access those that others have uploaded. The site is grant-funded for now, though Miller hopes to eventually add a premium paid subscription feature to it as well.
Miller, who previously worked for Athena Health in Belfast for 13 years, moved forward with the idea during a class on entrepreneurship that was part of an online master’s degree program in technology management and innovation she took through New York University during the COVID pandemic.
“I pitched it to my class and it was voted as one of the ones for us to work on,” Miller said. “We found that, yes, there is a problem here that other people have.”
Miller and some of her classmates did some research that found they could fill a need for home cooks — especially those with jobs and children — who were overwhelmed trying to come up with meals on the fly every night.
The parents were faced with the same problem Miller had been: there was no easy and modern space for consolidating their recipes, making it easier for them to lose track of them. Miller noted that it’s a particular challenge in rural areas, where busy families lack the variety of takeout options that cities have.
“We really want this to be a place where your precious index cards that were your grandmother’s could easily be uploaded,” Miller said.
Miller, who has worked to start the platform with a team that includes former Athena Health colleagues as well as developers in India, also hopes to add more features for businesses that share recipes, such as the ability to more easily link back to their own sites.
Since it launched a month ago with funding from the Maine Technology Institute, Watermelon Pie has seen its total number of users grow to more than 320.
Eventually, Miller hopes it’ll get much bigger.
Her goal, she said, is for “Watermelon Pie to be a platform that everyone is using to talk about food and cooking and to share their recipes in one place that’s as ubiquitous as something like Instagram, but it’s really just for food.”
