Technologies
Subscription-Based Meal Planning Platform
Overview
About Kitchen Made Menus
Kitchen Made Menus is a startup dedicated to simplifying meal planning and grocery shopping for busy families. Their mission is to provide an intuitive, easy-to-use platform that helps households eat healthy, home-cooked meals without the stress and time commitment of daily meal planning. The company operates on a subscription model, offering subscribers a streamlined solution to a common daily challenge.
Services
Their Challenge
Kitchen Made Menus had a powerful vision: to provide a subscription-based service that would deliver weekly, family-friendly meal plans directly to customers, complete with scaled recipes and an organized grocery list. To bring this vision to life, the client needed a technical partner who could build a robust, scalable website on a limited budget. They required a solution that was not only functional but also intuitive and mobile-optimized, allowing users to easily access their meal plans and shopping lists on the go. The biggest challenge was balancing the client’s ambitious vision with the constraints of being a self-funded startup, requiring a lean and strategic development approach.
Our Solution
Saritasa partnered with Kitchen Made Menus to build a custom WordPress website, utilizing a strategic blend of off-the-shelf and custom-built features. We selected WordPress and its default eCommerce capabilities to create a lean, cost-effective solution that delivered essential functionality without the heavy lift of a complete custom build. This approach enabled the client to launch quickly and test their market. The resulting platform allows users to subscribe, view weekly menus, customize recipes, and generate dynamic shopping lists, all through a clean, mobile-optimized interface.
Our Approach
What Saritasa Did
Lean Software Development
Given the client’s limited budget as a self-funded startup, we focused on building as lean as possible while still delivering core functionality. We built the website on WordPress, using a pre-existing template as a foundation to reduce development time and costs. By utilizing WordPress’s built-in backend for administrative functions, we were able to deliver a powerful, professional-grade website without a massive upfront investment. This approach ensured that the client could manage their recipes and content with a user-friendly interface.
Dynamic Meal Planning
The core of the website is a dynamic recipe and meal-planning system. Users can view the current and upcoming week’s menus and easily swap out recipes they don’t like. The platform features custom-built modules for ingredients, measurements, and recipes, allowing the system to accurately scale ingredient quantities based on the number of people a user is cooking for. This customization gives users full control over their weekly meals.
Shopping List Generator
A key feature for on-the-go users is the intelligent shopping list. The system automatically compiles all necessary ingredients for the entire week, but also provides the option to generate a list for specific days only. The list is organized by grocery store departments like “Produce” and “Canned Goods,” streamlining the shopping process and saving users time. Users can also manually add items to their shopping list, ensuring they have everything they need.
Mobile-First User Experience
The website was designed and optimized for mobile devices, recognizing that most users would access their shopping lists while at the grocery store. We built a custom “Cook Mode” feature for recipes that keeps the screen from going dark, ensuring users can follow along in the kitchen without interruption. The clean, distraction-free interface prioritizes the essential information (recipes, ingredients, and shopping lists), making it a valuable tool for busy families.
