About Cookoff

It started as a chili cookoff. Andrew Morse and his friends would get together once a year, make their best batch of chili, and compete to see who could claim bragging rights until the next one. What began as a casual gathering between friends quickly grew into a proper annual tradition - with categories, entrees, and increasingly serious competition.

Over the years the event evolved beyond chili. Pie cookoffs, general cooking competitions, themed challenges - the format kept expanding, but the voting system never changed. For five straight years, that meant paper tickets. Stacks of handwritten ballots passed around the table, collected in a bowl, and tallied by hand after the last bite.

If you've ever done this, you know the pain. Deciphering whether someone wrote a "3" or a "5." Losing a ballot between the couch cushions. Spending twenty minutes adding up scores while everyone waits around impatiently for results. After five years of this, Andrew decided he'd had enough.

With a background in tech, Andrew built the first version of Cookoff to solve his own problem: replace paper ballots with something that actually works. The idea was simple. Share a QR code, let people vote from their phone, and see results instantly. No paper, no spreadsheets, no arguments about handwriting.

The first version launched at the next annual cookoff, and it changed everything. Setup took minutes instead of an hour. Voting was faster and more accurate. Results appeared the moment the last vote came in. People actually enjoyed the voting process instead of treating it like a chore.

But something unexpected happened. Friends started asking to use it for their own events. A neighborhood pie contest. An office chili challenge. A family Thanksgiving dessert showdown. It turned out the problem wasn't unique to one annual cookoff - anyone running a food competition was dealing with the same headaches.

Cookoff has grown from a personal side project into a full-featured platform for running cooking competitions of any size. It supports multiple voting styles, real-time results, quick-join QR codes, collaborator management, and a native iOS app. Whether you're organizing a backyard chili cookoff for ten friends or a community bake-off for a hundred, it handles the logistics so you can focus on the food.

One thing Andrew loves about where Cookoff has ended up: anything can become a competition if you have an easy way to vote. That's the core insight. It doesn't have to be complicated. Give people a simple way to score and rank, and suddenly your casual potluck turns into the most fun event of the year. That's what Cookoff is for.