Meal Maestro
UI design | Product design
2025
Meal Maestro is a meal-planning app built on one finding: for busy professionals, the hard part is not cooking, it is deciding. It takes what you like, what you avoid and what is in your kitchen, and returns a week of recipes with the one grocery list that covers them.
Services:
Challenge:
Every app gives you recipes. None gives you a plan.
Role:
UI and product designer across research, synthesis, the design system and the core flows.
01
About
People do not give up on meal planning because they cannot cook, they give up because by Wednesday they have no decisions left.
Almost everybody who quits meal planning quits in the same place, and it is never the stove. It is a Wednesday evening, at the end of a working day, in front of a fridge.
So the product had to remove decisions rather than add features, which is the opposite of what the category does. Twelve interviews, 140 survey responses and third place at the GDG Design-a-thon all came out of following that one line.
02
Details
- Recognition
- 3rd: GDG Design-a-thon
- Research
- 12 interviews · 140 survey responses · 5 weeks
Challenge
Working professionals aged 28 to 45 said it plainly: “by the time I’m home, I’ve got no decisions left in me.” Twelve interviews and 140 survey responses pointed at the same cause: not motivation, but time and cognitive space.
Most apps answer with more options at seven in the evening, which adds to the exact thing that broke the week.
Solution
Automation over education. The app does the planning instead of teaching someone to plan, and returns a week of recipes with the one grocery list that covers them.
Planning and groceries stay one flow, because the research was blunt that disconnected tools are friction people refuse to tolerate. Personalisation is the retention mechanism, not a settings screen, and a tracker keeps progress visible so a good week reads as one.
03
The full case study
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