Designer | Artist
Needfinding
Gen Z can't cook.
At this point, it is a well-known fact that Gen Z struggles in the kitchen. From microwaved meals to fast food, Gen Z is pushed easy solutions that skip the learning and leave chefs without skills or the motivation to learn. That ends with us.
Pain Points: Meal planning/shopping, food waste, lack of skills, time commitment, access to ingredients
Design Criteria
Learn Real Skills
Custom Meal Plans
Works for Anyone
The most common form of cooking tutorials today are short-form videos found on social media. Historically, cookbooks, cooking shows, and family recipes taught users the skills they needed to cook delicious meals. I found there to be a large gap between the skilled knowledge and the checklist-style recipes we follow today, so GoodChef provides video tutorials that offer more than just clean visuals and trendy sounds. We aim to teach users how to perfect fundamental skills, which will help them with every recipe, not just the recipe at hand.
Planning a trip to the grocery store can really feel like a lengthy and hard task. Trying to think about everything you need for three meals a day takes a lot of effort, but we aim to ease that by doing the work for you. Each week users are sent a comprehensive shopping list that uses weight. These lists factor in the amount of each item needed based on your profile and generates a total sum making it easy for you. Open your app, view your list, cross off items you already have, and head to the store.
Goodchef is built for everyone! One of the biggest constraints with recipes and cooking are access to ingredients. Goodchef wants this to work for shoppers at Whole Foods and shoppers at the Dollar General, so we use generic ingredients that can be bought pretty much anywhere. By listing the items according to weight, a factor listed on every packaged item, we allow users from anywhere to learn and enjoy. We also have tips and tricks for identifying items you may not be used to, like cilantro.
How it Works
Personal Profile
Goodchef caters to you. Each weekly meal plan has been specifically designed for the group you need. Cooking for one? We've got you covered. Need to scale things up for a family of 6? We've got that too. When you create a profile, you have the option to select how many you are cooking for, reducing the waste or stretching the meals to what you need.
As the system develops, dietary restrictions like allergies and general food preferences could be added to your profile, recommending the best meal plans for you.
Grocery Lists
Grocery lists are automatically generated from the weekly meal plan. We calculate everything you need, so it's one convenient line. We also group ingredients based on where they would be found in the grocery store, another common problem that leads to forgotten items. After we spent years cooing for ourselves, we studied the ropes and brought them to you.
Meal Plans
The meal plans are fun, thoughtful, and built to help you learn. Plans are specifically designed to reduce waste by reusing special items throughout the week rather than letting them rot in the fridge. We also want users to explore and learn a wide range of skills, so we introduce meals and recipes that use common items in a new way, stretching those creative muscles and expanding one's recipe index. These meal plans do the work but they are also meant to teach. As you use them over time, you begin to see how they work and can start implementing the thought process to build your own plans one day.
Tutorials
When I was learning how to cook, everything I made for the first few years was terrible. I didn't know how to do anything, and if I did make an attempt at something, I had no real way to know if it worked or not. I was very discouraged for a long time because I thought the effort was a waste of time. Crossing things you can't do off a checklist feels like failing an exam you really wanted to pass. We are different because we teach you how to cook, not just show you how good we are.
Short videos that go through the process, not just the end result, connect with young users while giving them more information than the present solution. This would allow users to reach mastery rather than completion.