Kitchen Wizard: Recipe Finder For Dietary Restrictions

Kitchen Wizard gives users recipes that fit their lifestyle using what they have in their kitchen. Follow along with Kitchen Wizard as we look under the hood to see how everything came together.

• Summary:
  Total Cost: 500 hours | Length: 6 months | Type: Development | MVP v1: 200 hours, 2 months
• Platform:
  iOS
• Technology Stack:
  Objective-C, Laravel, PHP, MySQL, Spoonacular API

Background

When Kitchen Wizard first released version 1.0.0 into the market, it did not retain users. There was not enough recipe content (there were only about 500 recipes), and the team hadn’t set up the application’s administrative systems well enough to quickly adapt to the market’s needs with newer diets, more recipes, updated ingredients, etc. So the company was stuck with a product that didn’t work as intended due to design, content, and development bottlenecks.

Design Work:

We inherited a half built and half designed application, and much of the app would need to change. Read about our intensive design phase at https://www.behance.net/gallery/57391831/Kitchen-Wizard-Mobile-App.

Development Work:

After the redesign was finished, our development team was engaged to implement the updated designs and fix major longstanding performance issues. The existing codebase had a large number of crashing issues. It also didn’t have a fast enough content importing process, and the app itself was slow. We faced not only refactoring old code, but also re-writing code altogether; almost scrapping a lot of the original in favor of building code that was more up-to-date. The challenge was in staying within the old code languages to ensure features worked across the app while also integrating into more robust tools.

KITCHEN WIZARD’S FINAL NUMBERS

Let’s cut to the chase. Kitchen Wizard spent their hard earned capital on design and development. How did it turn out?

AWARDS

Nominated by BuzzFeed as a top app for the kitchen

RETENTION

Increased from 2% to 10%

CONTENT

Increased from 500 recipes to 70k recipes

REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES

Expanded from largely ineffective In App Recipe Purchases to Advertising for CPGs, White Labeling, Blogger Promotion, Licensing Data

RELIABILITY

Improved from 65% crash-free to 99.6% crash-free

SPEED

Increased from 12 sec avg. load time for recipes to 1.9 sec avg. load time for recipes

PARTNERSHIPS

Increased from no key partnerships to 103 blogging websites, 1 grocery store, 1 hospital

IN THE END…

In the end, we turned Kitchen Wizard around from a great idea to a great company. We say company instead of app, because that’s truly what happened. We increased their revenue opportunity three-fold, expanded their reach, created viral growth strategies, and provided genuine value to their users. The application is now stable and is preparing for launch in Fall of 2017.