Bite Club - Family Meal Planner

"What's for Dinner?" Solved. A family meal planner that understands how families really work. Make meal planning a team sport, and let everyone in your family suggest, share, vote & plan together.

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Inspiration

Being a parent is stressful, busy, complicated, and there's one question - every single day - which fills all parents with fear...

"What's for Dinner?"

The most common problem for any family, and there are roughly 2 billion families worldwide, all asking this single question - every day!

It's a problem my family faces, and every family we speak with knows the stress: fussy eaters, the same meals over and over again, finding inspiration, meal planning, the cost of it all...

Why is it so hard?! Well, we fixed it.

What it does

Bite Club has over 3,000 hand picked, proper recipes (not AI-generated nonsene). It can suggest meals that your family actually wants to eat, and lets the whole family decide together, so mealtimes become more like a team sport, everyone is involved, and that makes dinner time much more palatable.

Bite Club asks a little bit about your family and their individual tastes, and then gives you a customised list of meal ideas with a Bite Club Score for every one - perfectly matched to your tastes.

It helps parents find meals that cover everyones tastes. It helps kids discover new things. It makes meal planning super easy.

We also have a whole suggest and vote thing going on so any family member can have their say, plus a bunch of (optional) AI features to really bring suggestions to life.

And all this was so carefully crafted to work with you and your family. We know you're busy, so the app dynamically suggests actions. We know you might have family favourites you already cook - so you can add these to the app. We know sometimes you need a break, so you can even meal plan a takeout.

There's no judgement here, and. no demanding expectation to be a chef. Bite Club works with you and your family.

How we built it

Bite Club is built as a best-in-class iOS App. Native SwiftUI, Intents, iCloud and uses the latest iOS 27 features for Siri AI and Apple Intelligence. It uses a custom built back-end so we know your data is secure and safe.

The recipes and images in the app are NOT generated by AI. They have been sourced from a mixture of open-source datasets and paid for databases.

It uses Revenue Cat for a simple monthly subscription to "Bite Bot", who is an AI companion who helps understand your family even deeper level and give next-level suggestions.

During development we 'ate or own dog food' as a family, and then pestered our friends to do the same. By working with real families and watching how people use (or don't use!) the app was so revealing - you learn how a product "should" work and not how you "think" it should work. User feedback has made this app so special in how it promotes calls for action automatically, how it requires less taps to find information, how the UI changes depending on the person using it - and a ton of other small but critical details in the UI and UX.

Challenges we ran into

A real challenge is making people change their behaviour, and meal planning and cooking is a huge task with muscle memory baked in. We have carefully designed the UX of Bite Club to be super low friction and to provide real value as quickly as possible.

With some careful onboarding messages, huge early wins, and keeping a real personal tone in the app, we create a safe and compelling space where users want to come back.

Then some very carefully timed push notifications via One Signal help keep the Club engaged and coming back to the app to discover and plan their meals.

Keeping family data safe and secure was paramount, whilst still making suggestions in the app personal.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I have poured my heart and soul into this project, and having won Apple's 'Best of AppStore' in 2019 - I know what it takes to make a good app. Every pixel, every interaction, every button has been crafted and cared for. The whole UX and the way family members can work together is so unique, it brings team work and bonding to family meal times.

This isn't just a cute one-trick app, it's a fully fledged social network just for your family that solves a real problem and brings joy to meal times.

What's next for Bite Club

Marketing. Heh. And an Apple Design Award 2027!!

But more seriously - Bite Club is the app I've always wanted to write, and the product I've been most passionate about succeeding in this world. It solves a real problem, and it can make a huge impact on families all around the world.

This gives me huge motivation to follow through and continue the journey for this App until it becomes a huge success. We know the demand is out there, and we know we've solved a real problem in an amazing way - so it's exciting to be on a journey to push this out to the world.

First steps will be trying to get Apple to feature Bite Club. Then, in the New Year we will jump into the 'New Year, New You' train where people are keen to improve their lives. Hopefully this will get us enough traction to then move into more long form marketing - partnerships and evergreen content with influencers.

We are ready to take on the world!

Prize Categories

We are entering Bite Club for:

  • Grand Prize Award
  • RevenueCat Peace Prize
  • RevenueCat Design Award
  • Influencer Award - Nutrition & Healthy Eating: Abbey's Kitchen
  • Keep Them Coming Back Award

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