Our own meal-planning app.
Our own product · a meal-planning app we launched and later wound down
A meal-planning app we built and ran ourselves, took to real users, and then wound down when every route to revenue failed against a reason we had written down.
Overview
Food Forage was OpenKit's own product, a consumer app for eating more sustainably without being lectured about it. We built it on a bet that the question people want answered on a Tuesday is what is for dinner, so the app opened on the meal plan and kept the sustainability work underneath. That work showed in which recipes came up first and which ingredients ended up on the shopping list.
We ran it as a venture with its own budget, targets and research programme. The product content carried ingredients, allergens and pricing, and around it we built the recipe library, the stockist map, the shopping lists and the pantry. We did the marketing, the partnership approaches, the pitch decks and the funding applications ourselves. Then, about eighteen months in, we reviewed it properly and decided to stop spending on it.
- A meal plan at the centre of the app, with the recipe library and the shopping list built to feed it.
- Primary research: a survey into the communities we were aiming at, plus one-to-one interviews with users on the actual app.
- A written review that assessed four revenue models against the users we really had, and cut the spend.
1,000
Active users, the target we set ourselves.
10
Brands to onboard, on the same basis.
35 → 70
Recipes in the library, the content target the editorial side worked to.
£816
A month taken out of the burn when we stopped.
Challenge
Who the app had to work for
Sustainability apps tend to lecture, and the people most likely to change what they buy are the ones least interested in hearing about it mid-week.
Approach
Inside Food Forage
The home screen was the meal plan. Recipes could be swapped, skipped or repeated, and the app did its sustainability work by deciding what to offer first, which meant the seasonal, lower-waste option led the list without wearing a badge.
The shopping list was the part people actually opened. It was generated from the week's plan, deduplicated and grouped by aisle, and it went either to the shop with you or into an online basket. The stockist map, the pantry and the seasonal sections all existed to keep that list accurate.
Research
What the user research found
People did not know what to do first
The clearest and least flattering finding. On a first run, users could not tell what the app was for or what they were meant to do, and it only made sense once they had wandered around and come back.
Stockist pins went stale when the map moved
Stockist pins did not refresh when the map was panned, so a user looking at a new area was reading stale results without any signal that they were, which is a small bug with a large effect on whether the feature can be trusted at all.
The product data was too thin to decide with
Missing detail on products and dietary tags that were ambiguous enough to be useless to the exact person the app was for. If someone has to leave to check whether a product suits them, the app has not done its job.
The shopping list could not be shared or split
You could not split it by store, add your own items or send it to the person you live with. People shop in more than one place and rarely alone, so a list that cannot do those things gets replaced by the notes app.
Revenue
The revenue models we tested
The review started with how the money would arrive, taking each candidate in turn and testing it against the users we actually had. All four came back the same way.
- Subscription recipe app. Rejected because the product did not carry the features our own market research said a subscription would have to justify.
- Influencer platform. Rejected because there were not enough users to make the two-sided model work.
- In-app advertising. Rejected on the same grounds, with no audience to sell against.
- A showpiece for OpenKit. Set aside as a portfolio piece that generates little or no revenue.
We looked at pivots seriously: food waste, meal planning as its own product, a local and zero-waste shopping angle, delivery. None of them survived the same test, and a competitor feature comparison confirmed we were not close on the one that came nearest. So we cut the monthly spend and put that time back into client work.
Result
What we took from it
An idea is worth stopping when it cannot show who it is for and what it earns. We made that call on our own product with the research in front of us, and it is the same call we are willing to make on an AI idea of yours.
Build
The build and the controls on it
The build
- iOS, Android, web
- Meal-plan engine
- Recipe library with sustainability tags
- Auto-generated shopping list
- Checkout integration
Controls on this project
- UK GDPR
- UK data residency
Other engagements
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