Every ingredient in a YardFit recipe has to pass one test before it goes in: can you actually buy it, this week, without going out of your way?
That sounds obvious. In most nutrition apps, it isn't.
The two ways this usually goes wrong
Nutrition apps built somewhere else tend to assume a grocery store that doesn't look like the ones here. Ingredient lists lean on things that are either hard to find, unusually priced, or just not part of how people actually shop and cook locally. The app isn't wrong, exactly — it's just built for a different everyday life.
The opposite mistake happens too, when an app goes all-in on "authenticity" and reaches for the most traditional version of every dish, ingredients included — the kind of thing you'd need a specific vendor or a special trip to track down. It reads as more culturally serious, but it's less useful. A meal plan nobody can actually shop for isn't a meal plan.
What we do instead
We start from what's genuinely common — callaloo, breadfruit, saltfish, yam, scotch bonnet, plantain, the actual staples people cook with regularly, not a curated "cultural" list. Then we don't strip out the international ingredients that are just as normal a part of how people eat here — pasta, oats, chicken breast, rice. If it's something people actually buy and cook, it belongs in the app, regardless of where it originally came from.
The test isn't "is this authentically Jamaican" or "is this internationally familiar." It's simpler than either: is this something you can actually get, at a normal shop, today. Everything else follows from that.
Why this is the whole point
A meal plan is only useful if you can actually cook it. That's the entire premise YardFit is built on — not a curated food identity, not a purist ingredient list, just recipes built from what's realistically in reach. It's a small thing to get right, and it shapes almost everything else about how the app works.