About Crumble

It started with ramen

My girlfriend and I love going out to eat. We also love rating things, properly, with conviction. Years ago we found a ramen shop in Berlin called Cocolo Ramen, and it ruined us: it's the best ramen we've ever had. It even created a tradition: on the last day of every vacation, wherever we are, we have to try a local ramen spot and see how it measures up. We've eaten a lot of ramen in a lot of cities since. Cocolo is still number one.

Then we started forgetting

The problem with eating well everywhere is that memory doesn't scale. We'd stand in line somewhere going "what was that really good ramen place again?" or "where was that really good burger?" Photos didn't help; they're just blurry plates with no names. So we built Crumble: one place to track our food journey. Every spot, every dish, every rating, on a map we share.

Why friends, not strangers

Building it taught us something about public reviews: people rate things too high, too quickly. Everything on Google is a 4.6, which makes nothing a 4.6. What we actually trust is our friends' taste. If someone we share meals with says a place is genuinely good, we know we'll like it too. So Crumble is built around the circle: your reviews go to your friends, their finds show up on your map, and the ratings stay honest because they're for people you'll eat with, not for an algorithm.

There's a kindness angle too. Rating a small mom-and-pop shop below four stars in public feels terrible: you didn't love the meal, but you don't want to dent the livelihood of two people doing their best. On Crumble that tension disappears: your honest 3.5 stays inside your circle. You keep your integrity, the restaurant keeps its reputation.

Then the nerdery took over

We're also, to be honest, complete nerds about coffee and matcha. Different beans, different origins, different grades of matcha. We love going deep. But going deep meant a different app for every obsession, and I hated that. Our friends were already on Crumble, and it's genuinely fun to look back at a year of coffee beans. So we built the add-ons: tasting journals that have little to do with restaurant tracking and everything to do with nerding out about one specific thing. Whether it's coffee, matcha, tea, beer, wine, even whisky. Crumble's got it. I track my whisky bottles and my coffee; my girlfriend tracks her matcha. Everyone's happy.

Transparent on purpose

We wanted Crumble built in a way we could explain with a straight face: hosted in the EU, GDPR-compliant, no ads, no selling data, and costs kept low. But some costs are real, and that's why Crumble Plus exists. The principle is simple: we ask money for what costs money. Not "congratulations, you bought some emojis", but the AI that scans your receipt and autofills your data, and the image recognition that (slightly scarily) knows what you ate from one photo. Those run on paid infrastructure, so members fund them. Everything core stays free.

How it's built

• SvelteKit running on a single EU-hosted server: small, fast, accountable.
• Maps powered by MapLibre and OpenStreetMap. Venue data from Foursquare.
• Photos compressed in your browser before upload. EXIF (incl. GPS) stripped server-side.
• Hosted in the EU. GDPR-compliant by default; see our privacy policy.
• Software, for the record. No relation to Crumbl Cookies, the bakery franchise.

Open about security

Found a vulnerability? Read our disclosure policy. We accept reports, fix fast, and don't sue researchers acting in good faith.

Where it's going

We try to make Crumble as fun and interactive as we can: the daily food quiz, the food passport, the streaks. A food diary you don't enjoy opening is a food diary you abandon. If you eat out with people you like, Crumble is for you.