Brooke Beswick

Rethinking the Cooking Workflow

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Role

Defined product strategy and led end-to-end design across the full cooking journey.

Impact

Created a unified system that connects recipe creation, meal planning, and grocery workflows into a seamless experience.

Overview

Cooking today is fragmented. Recipes live across screenshots, social media, notes, and multiple apps, creating friction in moments that should feel simple.

This project rethinks the cooking experience as a connected system, where discovering, creating, planning, and sharing recipes happen seamlessly in one place.

Problem

Home cooking today is highly fragmented. Users manage recipes, meal planning, and grocery shopping across disconnected tools and formats, ranging from social media and notes to dedicated apps which creates friction across the entire workflow.

As a result, core tasks that should feel simple become inefficient:

Recipes are difficult to organize and retrieve
Meal planning is inconsistent and time consuming
Grocery shopping lacks alignment with planned meals
Opportunities to refine and improve cooking habits are lost

While existing solutions address individual parts of this journey, none effectively connect the end-to-end experience. This fragmentation leads to repeated effort, reduced consistency, and a lack of long term habit formation.

Objectives → Design Framing

Unify the experience

Connect recipes, planning, and shopping into one system.
How might we bring recipe creation, planning, and shopping into one seamless flow?

Reduce friction to get started

Make it easy to capture and use recipes from any source.
How might we support multiple ways of inputting recipes while maintaining structure and usability?

Drive consistent use

Design for simple, repeatable planning habits.
How might we make meal planning feel simple enough to become a weekly habit?

Keep things easy to manage

Help users stay organized as their recipes grow.
How might we make finding and organizing recipes effortless over time?

Support long term value

Allow users to refine and build on their cooking.
How might we help users improve through continued use?

Add lightweight social value

Enable sharing and feedback without overwhelming the experience.
How might we enable sharing and feedback in a way that feels lightweight and valuable?

Key Design Decisions

Flexible Recipe Input

Allowed multiple input methods (manual, copy/paste, photo) to reduce friction.

Tradeoff

Increased complexity in parsing and standardizing data, requiring looser structure upfront.

Meal Planning System

Positioned weekly planning as the central behavior to drive repeat usage.

Tradeoff

Introduced more upfront effort for users who prefer quick, one off recipe access.

Smart Organization

Used tagging and filtering to simplify organization at scale.

Tradeoff

Reduced user control in favor of speed and automation, which may not fit highly structured users.

Social Layer

Enabled sharing, ratings, and discovery without making the experience feel like a social feed.

Tradeoff

Limited depth of interaction in favor of simplicity and focus.

Research Inputs

To understand where current solutions fall short, I analyzed existing products and user behaviors across the cooking workflow.

Competitive Landscape

Mealime

Strong at structured meal planning with automated grocery lists and guided cooking flows. However, it is highly prescriptive and lacks flexibility for custom recipe creation and personalization.

Paprika

Excels at recipe saving, organization, and structured meal planning. However, it has limited support for discovery and no meaningful social or community features.

Whisk

Combines recipe saving, meal planning, and grocery lists into a more connected experience. However, it lacks intuitive custom cookbook creation and deeper tools for personalization and iteration.

Insights

Across all platforms, the gap wasn’t missing features but a lack of connection. The tools supported parts of the cooking journey, but not the full workflow. This fragmentation increases friction, making it harder for users to consistently plan, organize, and improve over time.

Whisk

Mealime

Paprika Recipe Manager

Design Strategy

Role Based Permissions

Different family members should have different levels of control.

Approval workflows

Children can suggest activities, but parents approve final scheduling.

Conflict awareness

Overlapping events should be surfaced clearly with simple resolution options.

Lightweight collaboration

The system should feel simple enough for daily use without overwhelming users.

Solution

Home & Browse

Enables discovery and quick re-entry into the cooking flow

Surfaces recipes by meal type to reduce decision fatigue
Allows users to quickly filter by time, ingredients, or cuisine
Brings back recently viewed recipes to support continuity
Introduces new content through personalized chef recommendations

Create Recipe

Removes friction from capturing recipes

Supports multiple input methods (manual, copy/paste, photo)
Structures recipes automatically while allowing flexibility
Allows users to document and personalize their cooking over time

Import from Browser

Bridges external content into the system

Extracts recipes directly from websites with minimal effort
Automatically structures and saves key information
Allows users to customize and categorize before saving

Recipe Page

Supports execution in the moment

Presents ingredients and steps in a clear, scannable format
Prioritizes readability and ease of use while cooking
Keeps users focused without unnecessary distractions

Cookbooks

Enables organization at scale

Allows users to group recipes into personalized collections
Makes it easy to revisit, manage, and curate recipes over time

Profile & Planning

Acts as the control center for ongoing use

Enables weekly meal planning with drag-and-drop flexibility
Automatically generates and organizes grocery lists
Supports real-time interaction (checking off items while shopping)
Introduces social features like sharing and following

Outcomes & Learnings

Workflow first design > feature-first design

Connecting actions across the journey created more value than optimizing individual features

Flexibility increases adoption

Supporting multiple input methods removes barriers to entry

Planning drives retention

Weekly meal planning acts as a natural engagement loop

Community unlocks scale

User generated content introduces long term growth potential

If I had more time…

This product lays the foundation for a more intelligent, adaptive cooking system that evolves with the user and supports them in real time. If I had more time I would

Leverage behavior and preferences to recommend meals, optimize planning, and anticipate needs
Suggest ingredient substitutions and adjustments based on dietary goals, constraints, or available ingredients
Enable cookbooks, planning, and shopping across families or groups
Explore voice interfaces to support users while cooking, without disrupting flow
Investigate AR to provide step-by-step assistance directly within the cooking environment

What this says about me

I approach design as a systems problem, not just a feature exercise. I focus on how individual interactions connect into a cohesive, end-to-end experience. I prioritize reducing friction, shaping repeatable behaviors, and aligning user needs with long-term product value. My work balances structure and flexibility, with an emphasis on creating scalable foundations that can evolve with the product.

Final Thought

This project reflects a shift from designing isolated tools to designing connected experiences. By unifying the cooking journey into a single system, the product moves beyond task completion to support consistency, habit formation, and long term engagement.

Rethinking the Cooking Workflow

Rethinking the Cooking Workflow

Problem

Objectives → Design Framing

Key Design Decisions

Research Inputs

Design Strategy

Solution

Outcomes & Learnings

If I had more time…

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