Food Forage - Sustainable Meal Planning App

Food Forage is an innovative meal planning app, designed to empower users by providing tools that simplify the adoption of sustainable eating habits. The app offers a seamless interface allowing users to explore a wide array of recipes, set up detailed meal plans, and generate precise shopping lists that can be used for online or in-store purchases. Our goal was to make sustainable diets not only possible but also easy and accessible to all.

• User Engagement and Retention: Designing an interface that was not only user-friendly but also engaging enough to encourage repeated use in a competitive market.
• Data Accuracy and Integration: Ensuring the accuracy of vast amounts of data, including recipes, nutritional information, and sustainability metrics, and integrating this data reliably across various platforms.
• Scalability: Creating a scalable solution that could handle increasing loads and a growing database of recipes and user profiles for a global audience with diverse dietary needs and preferences.

Strategy and Planning

Our primary goal was to develop Food Forage as a comprehensive tech solution that would encourage sustainable eating. We approached the project with a strong emphasis on strategic planning, architecture design, and market positioning to ensure both an impactful launch and long-term viability.

• Planning Architecture: We laid out a robust architectural framework for Food Forage, ensuring that the app could scale effectively and manage high volumes of user data and interactions.
• Marketing Strategy: We crafted a targeted marketing strategy that leveraged digital platforms, focusing on partnerships with eco-friendly brands and influencers.
• Business Planning: We conducted extensive market research to identify key user demographics and their preferences, helping us design features around the needs of individuals committed to reducing their environmental impact through diet.

User Interface Design

The user interface (UI) design for Food Forage aimed to create a seamless and engaging experience that would encourage users to adopt sustainable eating habits.

• Aesthetics: We chose a clean and modern design aesthetic with a calming colour palette inspired by nature, reinforcing the sustainability theme.
• Usability: We ensured ease of use by employing familiar design patterns, such as bottom navigation bars for easy thumb-reach on mobile devices, and collapsible menus to reduce clutter.
• Interactive Elements: We integrated interactive elements such as swipe-to-delete for shopping list items and drag-and-drop for organising meal plans to make the app not only functional but also enjoyable to use.

We chose Flutter as our development framework for its cross-platform capabilities, allowing us to efficiently deploy on both iOS and Android from a single codebase. Throughout the development phase, we adhered to agile methodologies, which allowed for iterative testing and refinement of the app based on user feedback.

• Flutter & Dart for iOS, Android and Web application
• Typescript, Node.js
• Google Firebase, Cloud Functions, Realtime Database, Firestore database, Firebase Authentication