A cooking app that knows what is in your kitchen
About the project
Kitchen Aid is a cooking assistant for the iPad on the kitchen counter: recipes, meal plans, groceries and your equipment in one app, held sideways.
The client’s brief asked for a calm, friendly home for everything that happens before and during a meal: finding a recipe, planning the week, keeping track of what is in the cupboards, and making the shopping list. It had to be soft and approachable, in pastel colours with rounded shapes, and it had to work on an iPad propped up in landscape while someone cooks.
We designed a first round in portrait, took the client’s 17 points of feedback, and redrew the whole app for a horizontal iPad. The result is 23 screens across seven sections: Home, Recipes, Groceries, Meal Plan, Shopping List, Equipment and Account, with step-by-step cooking, timers and an AI assistant inside every recipe.
- Client
- Kitchen Aid
- Stage
- New Product, Brief to Design
- Services
- Mobile App Design · UI/UX Design Services
- Platform
- iPad App, Landscape
- Timeline
- From December 2024, Two Rounds
The challenge
Recipe apps know cooking. They do not know your kitchen.
Most recipe apps start from the recipe and leave the rest to you. You pick a dish, then find out halfway through that you are out of eggs, or that it needs a pan you do not own. Meanwhile the spinach you bought for last week’s plan goes off at the back of the fridge. The client wanted an app that cut that waste, and that felt friendly enough to keep open on the counter every day.
So the app had to hold more than recipes. It needed to know what is in the pantry, the fridge and the freezer, what is about to expire, and which tools are in the drawers, then bring that into every recipe, meal plan and shopping list. And it had to stay calm while doing it, readable from arm’s length, on a tablet turned on its side.
The product
From the cupboard to the plate
Seven sections on one bar at the foot of the screen, all working from the same kitchen.
Home opens on trending recipes, a pantry overview and today’s meals. Recipe cards carry the rating, likes, cooking time and the creator. Recipes adds categories, saved recipes and popular creators, and anyone can create a recipe of their own, with ingredients, nutrition and numbered directions, or import one.
Groceries counts what you have and how much of it is near expiration, then sorts it by where it lives: pantry, fridge and freezer. An Expiring Soon row shows what to use first, and new items go in with a scan. The pantry lists everything by category, from baking to bakery.
The meal plan lays out the week day by day, each meal with its time, its cooking time and how many ingredients are missing. The shopping list is grouped by day, and each item can be sent to the pantry once it is bought.
Before you start, a recipe shows prep, cook time and servings, how many of its ingredients and tools you already have, and its nutrition. Change the servings and the times and nutrition follow. Then step-by-step directions, ingredients you tick off as you go, built-in timers, and a chat with an AI assistant for questions like what to use instead of whipped cream.
The idea
The kitchen comes first
Pantry, fridge, freezer and equipment are not settings tucked away in a menu. They have their own sections and feed everything else, so a recipe can say you have seven of its ten ingredients and four of the tools before you start.
Use it before you lose it
The client’s goal was less food waste, so expiry became something you see without looking for it: a count on the Groceries header, an Expiring Soon row, and an “expires in 2 days” note on an ingredient inside the recipe that uses it.
Built for a tablet on its side
The first round was portrait. The feedback asked for a horizontal iPad, so we redrew every screen for it: ingredients and equipment stay on the left while the steps run on the right, and the AI chat opens beside the ingredient list, so what you need stays in view while you ask.
Soft, but never vague
The brief asked for something cute and calm. Pastel peach, green and yellow tiles, rounded cards and a floating tab bar give it that, while every card still carries the facts that matter: time, likes, who made it, what is missing.
Impact
One app for the whole kitchen
Kitchen Aid went from a written brief to a complete iPad app in two rounds. We took the client’s 17 points of feedback into the second round and redrew the app for landscape: 23 screens in seven sections, where recipes, meal plans and the shopping list all start from what is already in the kitchen.
23
iPad screens
17
Feedback points
7
Sections, one tab bar
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