Tradish : Designing a global food discovery app from a personal passion

Project overview

Tradish is a mobile application for iPhone and iPad that helps home cooks discover, plan and cook authentic dishes from many cultures. As the founder, product strategist, UX designer and engineer, I built the first version in a six-week sprint (July-August 2025). Since then I have released incremental updates, gathered feedback and iterated on onboarding, recipe management and meal planning features.

I wrote this to show how I reason through product decisions, not only what ended up in the app.

Personal and problem context

Growing up in a multicultural family in London, food was my bridge to countless cultures. I learned dishes from relatives, friends, and later from YouTube videos. As I took up cooking, I noticed a gap:

Finding diverse meals was hard. I'd try a Persian stew one week and Senegalese fish the next, but outside of word-of-mouth or random online searches, there was no tool that helped me continue exploring. Most recipe apps focused on generic or western food and emphasised nutrition tracking or trendy content.

The friction I experienced became the seed of Tradish. I wanted an app that:

• Celebrated culture and heritage as much as calories and macros.
• Was as quick to use as grabbing a recipe from a friend.
• Encouraged experimentation and planning without overwhelming users.

Users

• Primary: Busy home cooks who are culturally curious. They cook several times per week, crave variety and want to plan meals without spending hours researching.
• Secondary: Diaspora users who want to rediscover dishes from their heritage and keep family recipes alive.
• Not targeted: Professional chefs and social media-driven foodies; they require different feature sets (deep customization or social sharing), which would have distracted from the MVP focus.

Goals and success metrics

I defined concrete goals to keep the app outcome-driven:

Constraints and assumptions

• Solo founder: As both designer and developer, I had to balance scope with feasibility. I limited the MVP to a few high-impact features to ship quickly.
• AI maturity: Recipe generation relies on language models. I assumed users would accept generative recipes if they could see and edit the output.
• Dataset bias: I understood that not all cultures were equally represented in the dataset. A long-term goal was to source more diverse recipes.

Competitive analysis

Rather than building a feature matrix, I studied where competing products focus their energy:

Design process

Final screens

A guided tour of the shipped app, with callouts on the design decisions behind each screen.

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Screen 1

Home — Let's cook!

Friendly entry point that nudges the user straight to action.

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  Pixel-art mascot

  Human, playful branding that sets Tradish apart from sterile recipe apps.
• 2
  Daily fun fact

  Cultural context delivered in a single glance — no reading required.
• 3
  One-tap "Cook Now"

  Reduces decision fatigue by always surfacing a single recommended meal.
• 4
  Popular searches

  Cuisine-first discovery instead of ingredient-first filtering.

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Screen 2

Home — search & recipe card

Orange discovery header with popular chips, search and a full recipe preview.

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  Popular searches

  Cuisine chips keep discovery one tap away from the keyboard.
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  Search field

  Single field for recipes, ingredients or cuisines.
• 3
  Recipe sheet

  Title, story, macros and ingredients without leaving home.
• 4
  Tab bar

  Home stays primary; Plan and profile stay reachable.

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Screen 3

Recipe detail

All the info needed to decide and cook — without scrolling walls of text.

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  Search always visible

  Users can pivot to a different recipe without leaving the flow.
• 2
  At-a-glance meta

  Time, calories, meal type and prep — the four questions users actually ask.
• 3
  Macro breakdown

  Protein, carbs, fat in a glance so health-conscious users don't need a separate tracker.
• 4
  Clean ingredient list

  Scannable bullets with accent dots that tie back to the Tradish orange.

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Screen 4

Meal planner

Weekly planning that feels as lightweight as a calendar, not a spreadsheet.

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  Week navigation

  Arrows + explicit date range prevent the "what week am I on?" problem.
• 2
  Weekly summary

  Calories + macros auto-aggregated so the user never does the math.
• 3
  Shopping list CTA

  One tap to turn the plan into a grocery trip — the highest-value action.
• 4
  Completed states

  Green + strikethrough gives dopamine + clear progress signal.

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Screen 5

Shopping list

Auto-generated, grouped by aisle, with a real-world checkable UI.

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  Auto-sync

  Refresh pulls the latest ingredients from the plan — no manual entry.
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  Clear completed

  Lets users reset after a shop without losing the category structure.
• 3
  Aisle groupings

  Pantry, Meat, Produce etc. — mirrors how people actually walk a store.
• 4
  Big checkboxes

  Thumb-sized targets optimised for one-handed use in a supermarket.

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Screen 6

Saved recipes

A personal cookbook that rewards exploration.

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  Personal framing

  "My Saved Recipes" + "Your Personal Recipe Collection" creates ownership.
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  Emoji thumbnails

  Cheap but delightful visual identity for every cuisine.
• 3
  Consistent meta

  Time + calories appear on every card — predictable scanning pattern.

Experience principles

Before wireframing, I established three principles to guide every design decision:

• Speed over completeness. Minimise steps to see value. If users don't get a recipe quickly, they drop off.
• Culture feels human, not academic. Avoid dry encyclopaedic descriptions. Each recipe includes a brief story to provide context, drawn from trusted sources.
• Planning reduces decisions, not adds them. Weekly planning surfaces only the most relevant options and suggests default calorie distributions so users aren't overwhelmed by numbers.

Information architecture

I kept the navigation intentionally shallow:

• Home: AI-generated suggestions and quick search.
• Discover: Explore by culture, ingredient or popularity.
• Plan: Weekly meal planner with summary statistics (calories, cost, prep time).
• Saved: A personal library of recipes.
• Profile: Manage preferences and subscriptions.