A weekly meal companion built around how people plan, shop, and cook
The Cooking App is a personalised cooking companion that learns your dietary preferences through a quick onboarding flow, then covers the full journey — recipe discovery, weekly meal planning, automated shopping lists sent to supermarkets, and smart kitchen device integration.
Sole designer. I owned research, IA, wireframing, UI design, design system, prototyping, and branding — collaborating through weekly design reviews. The project started as my own concept, was pitched to a professional chef, and finalised as a concept app.
During COVID, cooking became a daily necessity but existing apps offered little real personalisation, disconnected shopping, and no smart home integration. Food brands also lacked a meaningful way to reach home cooks at the point of intent. The gap was clear: no single product covered the cooking journey end-to-end.
For home cooks, a short onboarding flow captures dietary preferences so every recommendation is instantly tailored. Users build a weekly meal plan, convert it to a shopping list sent directly to their supermarket, and connect smart appliances — ovens, fridges, smartphones — to orchestrate timers, temperatures, and low-stock alerts from one place.
For brands, a built-in monetisation layer enables contextual engagement, loyalty building, and new commercial partnerships — reaching users at the moment they are planning or cooking.
The concept was entirely my initiative. I identified during the first lockdown that no app treated cooking as a complete experience, and designed the integrated vision — dietary onboarding, personalised results, meal planning, supermarket connectivity, and smart device orchestration — that became the foundation of the entire project.
Discover & Define. Following the Double Diamond, I audited existing cooking apps, mapped their gaps, and developed user personas covering home cooks with varying needs and tech habits. A prioritised feature list emerged from this research, grounding every design decision in real behaviour.
Design & Deliver. I moved from wireframes to a custom design system in Sketch, covering all core flows — onboarding, discovery, meal planner, shopping list, and device pairing. Interactive prototypes drove weekly review sessions, and the final output was a fully resolved, pitch-ready concept app.
