Culina is a concept app aiming to provide young adults the tools to better organise meal plans, save recipes in a personal journal, and manage grocery lists.
Overview
Culina
Culina is a concept productivity app I designed in my free time, centered around meal planning, grocery lists, and a recipe journal. Inspired by how I used Notion to save meals, I created Culina both as a learning project and to explore how a meal planning app could better serve younger people like myself and my friends.
The goal is to help young people build cooking skills and meal knowledge, supported by features that make planning and shopping easier. It will start simple in functionality and features to be a foundation I can build upon to make each more versatile, flexible and powerful.
Role
Product Designer
Timeframe
2-4 weeks
Team
Me
Tools
Problem
When time is short, cooking competes with convenience. Food delivery apps make it easy to eat quickly, but over time, that convenience adds up — in cost, health, and even a sense of control.
I realised this problem through my own experience — I’ve never been a particularly confident cook. Over time, I’ve been slowly building my skills: learning what meals I enjoy, how to cook them, and occasionally trying something new. Fortunately, I have a mother who’s a great cook and has helped me along the way.
But not everyone has that support. For many young adults living independently — or with parents who also rely on convenience — cooking can feel overwhelming and inaccessible. I wanted to explore how design could help bridge that gap and make cooking at home feel approachable, not intimidating.
Solution
Culina gives young adults a way to document their cooking journey, from meals they want to learn, to favourites from family, to their own experiments.
The app is built around flexibility. Every recipe starts with a title, and from there users can add as much or as little as they want — ingredients, steps, photos, or even a link to a video. It’s about letting people shape the experience in a way that fits how they actually cook, not forcing them into a rigid system.
By giving users control over how they record and revisit their meals, Culina makes cooking feel more personal and approachable. It’s not trying to compete with professional cookbooks or celebrity chefs. It’s more about creating a space that grows with the user and reflects the real, messy process of learning to cook and figuring things out along the way.
Wireframing
Up until this point the app was in my head, here I laid everything out, recognized flaws, some confusion, and ultimately iteration and ideation continued.
The app started with the designing of the Journal aspect of it, saving meals, creating meals, deleting or editing etc. This is arguably the most fleshed out core feature.
The grocery list was simple in nature on purpose, as I believe it is something that will naturally change, but also it needs to be reliable, you need to access it easily and quickly.
The last core feature, meal planning, ending up being the more difficult of the three, it was inherently flawed and confusing, and definitely needs more refinement.
User Interviews
Talking to friends, and their feedback helped me understand inconsistencies, complexities, and what they would or could see themselves using or ignoring.
Very much informal feedback but feedback nonetheless, they helped point out some things I would naturally as the person creating it overlook, ways to simplify, and asked questions I ended up asking myself. With the feedback I plan to continue refining and solidifying the identity of this app, its purpose and value it brings.
Can I search for specific meals or ingredients in their respective screens.
Too many steps when creating a meal plan. I only follow one meal plan.
Can I create custom grocery lists whenever manually or from my meals.
Can I full screen the ingredients and grocery lists.
Too many options when creating a meal can be overwhelming.
Better sorting/filtering when using meals in other screens.
Final Design
With the feedback on the wireframes I've simplified creating a meal and included the add block button which then lets users further customize how they want to save recipes.
Here's a look at some of the core screens for the app. It should be said these are not necessarily how the app might look in the future as I do plan on seeing how color might look excluding the semantic use for alerts or danger buttons. The main additions to the design from the wireframe is in the meal creation, removing all the options with required or optional.
Check out below for some animated mockups of the core screens & features.
Recipe Journal
Core Feature
Users can create and save meals in their own personal journal, whether it be already learnt meals or new experiments they want to try.
As seen in the interaction below you build the recipe with these blocks, only requiring a title to be saved, you can then decide to add however many supporting blocks is necessary. Add the ingredients, cooking steps and an image of it finished or simply add the ingredients and link a youtube video for the cooking steps.
I want to build this feature of the app to be as in depth or surface level as the user chooses.
Meal Plan
Core Feature
Select your days, add your meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner to easily track and prepare what you need to eat each day.
Providing a flexible and easy to setup meal plan is crucial for people to even consider using it and following it to some extent. Future features could be including a statistics/overview of a created meal plan for the user to better understand the nutritional values.
This is also very much a subject to change/work in progress feature I plan to refine and flesh out more with feedback.
Grocery List
Core Feature
Easily create a simple grocery list you can update and edit at any time anywhere you like
This feature whilst inherently simple, just a list, can be added with other powerful features that can increase the value but also the complexity.
For example utilizing saved meals and their ingredients could an interest and time saving way of creating grocery lists but the issues arises with how do you translate saved ingredients to a grocery list? they can be inherently different for example how would you translate 4 tsp of milk in a recipe to a grocery list?
Another ambitious idea would be could you estimate the price of the grocery list by where the user is located and the store they are shopping at? There are many various ideas I have but at least in the beginning and maybe forever this needs to be simple and easy, a to do list the user can mark off as they get what they need.
Blocks
Feature
This could effectively be how the other features are also built, but as of now the example currently applies to the recipe journal.
This showcases the first example/exploration into how one would make a block more powerful by adding actions to add specific UI elements to it. For example adding a note inside
Lists
Concept
Add specific details to ingredients
Dividers
Concept
Separate steps
Timers
Concept
Timers in an Expanded Block
Expanded Block
Concept
Add to an expanded block
Outcome
Culina became a simple but complete 0 → 1 concept app that explores how design can support young adults in building confidence and structure around cooking.
In its current form, it focuses on the basics — saving recipes, planning meals, and managing grocery lists — to show how each core part could work together in a calm and flexible way. Building it helped me think more deeply about how design can balance guidance with freedom, and how a product can adapt to people rather than forcing them to adapt to it.
It’s also a strong foundation to build on. I already have ideas for how it could evolve, like smarter recipe suggestions or shared family cookbooks, but for now, it represents the core idea: helping people feel capable and in control of what they eat, one meal at a time.
Retrospective
Refined not only how I create ideas but starting to incorporate informal user feedback from friends. Utilizing AI to help research and understand user insights to make more informed design decisions.
This is my first project that attempts to incorporate informal user interviews/testing from friends to help understand user needs. Utilizing AI to help quickly research and gain an understanding from various sources in what makes a powerful app for the targeted age demographic. Looking at my own life and taking inspiration from how I currently save and plan my meals.
Animated interactions
Recently started using Jitter to easily and quickly create animated interactions in how each flow might work. Compared to Figma Prototyping I can create more focused interactions that also look much better.
Feedback from Friends
By showing my flows and ideas to friends I can incorporate real user feedback from people I am trying to design for. Not all feedback is incorporated but may come in the future.
AI Research
Utilizing AI to uncover user insights from various sources to inform the overall design decisions and directions. I of course take an amount of skepticism with this part but I do think it will be extremely valuable.
Core Features
I think all my core features are good ideas they just need more refining. The journal is probably the more valuable feature as it can act as a way to document meals you want to cook, want to learn, want to save, and more which just opens up the amount of different uses and presumably users on the app.
Other Features
Currently my only non core feature is the Blocks which I do like and it needs to be refined and possibly expanded with more ideas. I do think I want to refine the core flow of the app, then try and introduce an update for sub features to it which again increases the uses and value of the app for more people.
Future Vision
I'd like to explore social features like, recipe discovery, collaborative meal plans, and short or long form content learning how to cook. Or even progress tracking in following a meal plan, money spent weekly on groceries, and more.
I do think the immediate future of the project is more refining of the design system, the core features that make it what it is, and then further fleshing out some smaller necessary features. There might also be time to think about how it might look on a tablet or as a desktop app etc so people can use wherever and however they like.
Social features could mean a lot of things but the ability to possibly collaborate with other in one single recipe journal, or grocery list etc could be immensely valuable. For example, a husband and wife could collaborate or at the very least add and update a shared grocery list making it easier for either to get the ingredients they need for the other to cook etc.