Sara, 27 · The Organized Planner
Cooks several times a week, plans ahead, but still finds the weekly process overwhelming. Needs efficient meal planning and organized grocery lists tied to recipes.
RicoCibo.
A mobile app concept that grew from a simple pantry tracker into a full social platform for recipe discovery, smart grocery lists, and food expiration monitoring, all in one place.
Overview
RicoCibo (Italian: "rich food") started with a focused premise: give people a way to track expiration dates on their pantry items so food stops going to waste. Through user research, interviews, and iterative design, the concept expanded into something bigger. A social app where users swipe through recipes, build smart grocery lists, and track what they already have at home.
The core tension we designed around: grocery shopping and meal planning are genuinely frustrating, but every existing solution either does too little or charges you to have the work done for you. RicoCibo puts the user in control without making the process feel like more work.
Problem
Grocery shopping and meal planning can be time-consuming and disorganized for people who cook regularly or want to maintain healthier eating habits. Shoppers struggle to decide what meals to make, remember what ingredients to buy, and keep track of what they already have at home.
This leads to stressful shopping trips, overspending on duplicate items, wasted food, and more often than not just ordering takeout because the effort of figuring it all out feels like too much.
Our insight: by combining meal planning with food tracking in one platform, an app can help users save time, reduce food waste, save money, and make healthier choices without adding friction.
Research
We ran surveys and in-person interviews to understand real shopping and cooking behaviors. A few patterns came through clearly: most users rely on grocery lists and cook regularly, yet still struggle with meal planning, food waste, and accidentally buying things they already have.
Interview participants confirmed the need directly. Angela, one interviewee, told us: "I also waste a lot of money by never cooking some of the things I buy and they end up expiring." Ernesto, another, said he'd genuinely use saved shopping lists and expiration notifications for items he'd forgotten about.
Key pain points
Deciding what to cook, forgetting items, buying duplicates, and food expiring before it's used.
What users actually want
Recipe-based shopping lists, expiration reminders, and a way to avoid redundant purchases.
User Personas
Three personas shaped our design priorities across different levels of cooking engagement and planning habits.
Jake, 22 · The Unstructured Shopper
College student who shops without a real plan, buys duplicates, and lets food expire. Needs quick grocery planning, expiration reminders, and easy meal suggestions.
Chilly, 36 · The Family Chef
Cooks daily for his family and manages multiple overlapping recipes. Needs a list that separates ingredients per recipe and flags when quantities overlap.
Core Features
The feature set was shaped directly by what personas needed most and what research confirmed people were failing to do with existing tools.
Pantry & Inventory Tracking
Log what you have at home by scanning a receipt. The app stores purchased items automatically.
Expiration Date Monitoring
Track when items are going bad and receive notifications before they spoil.
Recipe Discovery
Swipe through recipes like a social feed. Higher-rated community recipes rise to the top and you can save favorites to build your personal collection.
Smart Grocery Lists
Build your shopping list from the recipes you've saved. The app calculates exactly what you need based on what you already have.
Integrated Meal Planning
Plan meals around your existing stock to maximize your budget and minimize trips to the store.
Social Recipe Sharing
Upload your own recipes, rate others, and explore community content with short-form video tutorials.
Competitive Landscape
Existing solutions split into two camps: grocery-focused apps (ShopRite, Instacart, AnyList, Out of Milk) and cooking-focused apps (Mealime, HelloFresh). None of them combine recipe-based shopping, pantry tracking, and expiration monitoring in a free, user-controlled platform.
RicoCibo's differentiator is the integration layer. You shouldn't need three separate apps to decide what to cook, make a list, and remember what's in your fridge. The SWOT we ran confirmed the opportunity: a growing eco-conscious market, potential for grocery chain partnerships, and a problem space competitors haven't fully unified.
Design & Prototype
The design system uses a green palette anchored around natural, food-forward tones. From early hand-sketched wireframes through to high-fidelity Figma screens, the visual language stayed consistent: clean navigation, swipeable recipe cards, clear list organization, and color-coded expiration warnings.
The Figma file below shows the full design overview, including the user flow from login through pantry tracking, recipe discovery, and grocery list generation.
The interactive prototype walks through the primary user flow, starting from the home screen through recipe browsing, grocery list creation, and the expiration tracker.
User Journey
We mapped the existing grocery experience to find where friction was highest and where RicoCibo could make the biggest difference.
Dinner Decisions
Users feel indecisive and overwhelmed trying to figure out what to cook. RicoCibo's recipe discovery addresses this with a swipeable feed personalized to what you've cooked before.
Making the List
Users add items from memory and forget things anyway. Smart grocery lists built from saved recipes take the guesswork out entirely.
At the Store
Shoppers buy duplicates or extras because they can't remember what they have at home. Pantry tracking with live inventory visibility fixes this in-store.
Reflection
The most important lesson from this project was how quickly a focused idea can grow through research. What started as "track expiration dates" became a full social food platform once we understood what users actually struggled with across the whole cooking and shopping experience.
The SWOT analysis made clear that the real risk isn't the idea, it's habit change. An app like this only works if users consistently update their inventory. That tension drove us to design receipt scanning as the primary onboarding mechanism: reduce the manual lift and adoption becomes easier.
Working through the full UX process, from surveys and interviews to personas, journey maps, competitive analysis, wireframes, and high-fidelity Figma, gave me a much clearer framework for how research decisions shape design outcomes.
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