Food Forage. 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.
Our own product Real user research Wound down after review
What Food Forage was.
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 people would rather know what they are cooking on Tuesday than read a carbon dashboard, 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. Product content with ingredients, allergens and pricing; a recipe library; a stockist map; shopping lists and a pantry; a survey and sit-down interviews with real users; marketing, partnership approaches, pitch decks and funding applications. Then, about eighteen months in, we reviewed it properly and decided to stop spending on it.
- 01
A meal-plan surface with the recipe library and the shopping list built to feed it.
- 02
Primary research: a survey into the communities we were aiming at, plus one-to-one interviews with users on the actual app.
- 03
A written review that assessed four revenue models against the users we really had, and cut the spend.
Inside Food Forage.
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. So 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.
The targets we set.
active users, the target we set ourselves.
brands to onboard, on the same basis.
recipes in the library, the content target the editorial side worked to.
a month taken out of the burn when we stopped.
No final user count or revenue figure exists for Food Forage. The review recorded "not enough users" as the blocker on two of the four revenue models.
What the user research found.
- 01
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.
- 02
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.
- 03
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.
- 04
The shopping list could not be shared or split
No splitting by store, no adding your own items, no sharing a list with 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.
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: the product did not carry the features our own market research said a subscription would have to justify.
-
Influencer platform
Rejected: not enough users to make the two-sided model work.
-
In-app advertising
Rejected: same reason, there was not the audience to sell against.
-
A showpiece for OpenKit
Considered and set aside: 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.
What we took from it.
We set targets we could be judged against, asked real users what was wrong with the product, and tested each route to revenue against the position we were actually in. The answers came back the same way four times, and we stopped.
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
More of the work.
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