Chef's Choice

Overview

Chef's Choice is a food ordering platform built to close the gap between home cooks and their neighborhoods. I owned design end-to-end — from discovery through shipped product.

Problem

Home cooks have no low-friction way to sell meals in their community. Existing platforms require licenses, fees, and infrastructure that most cooks can't access. Chef's Choice needed to feel approachable for both cooks and buyers while handling real commerce.

Approach

I ran competitive analysis across Goldbelly, EatWith, and local Facebook buy/sell groups to understand where people were already solving this problem. Mapped the core flows — browse, order, fulfill — and prototyped fast before touching production.

Design

Focused on trust signals: verified profiles, clear pricing, pickup windows. The chef dashboard was the harder UX problem — it needed to work on a phone in a kitchen with one hand. Built a component library in Figma that mapped directly to the React component structure.

Outcome

Launched MVP on schedule. Onboarded 12 home cooks in the first week. Stripe integration handled first transactions without issues. Iterating toward delivery and neighborhood-based discovery.