Happy Meal Prep

As COVID reshaped daily routines, demand for prepared meals grew rapidly. People wanted convenient, reliable options, yet many small meal-prep businesses had no digital foundation to support that shift. Most relied entirely on social media posts or weekly messages to communicate menus and pricing. With rising interest and no structured online presence, these businesses struggled to present themselves professionally or keep pace with the expectations of modern customers.

The challenge emerged clearly: help local kitchens step into a digital-first world quickly, confidently, and in a way that preserved their identity. This wasn’t about fixing failing systems, it was about introducing digital architecture where none existed and designing an experience that could serve many businesses at once.

We set out to build a white-label SaaS platform that would act as the operating system for meal delivery brands, guided by the mission to empower small businesses to thrive autonomously. The vision was centered on three strategic pillars: Empower owners with total brand control, Simplify the user experience to reduce friction, and Scale the technical foundation to support growth without added complexity.

Our goal was to create “one system, infinite brands”—a flexible architecture that allowed over 100 different businesses to rapidly onboard while maintaining their unique visual identities. We needed to give founders confidence through robust management tools while simultaneously providing health-focused customers with the transparent, seamless ordering experience they demanded.

Working as the Design Lead within a cross-functional team, I facilitated a discovery phase that balanced rapid market validation with deep user empathy. We analyzed customer feedback and surveyed users, uncovering that a staggering 60% of friction stemmed from a lack of clear menu details and nutritional transparency. To address this, we utilized an impact-effort matrix to define a focused MVP centered on high-value features like menu management, checkout flows, and loyalty programs, ensuring we solved the most critical problems first.

To support the “white-label” nature of the product, I built a comprehensive design system utilizing variable fonts and auto-layout components. This modular approach allowed us to deploy a consistent UX framework across multiple brands, ensuring that button states, typography, and badges remained uniform in function but flexible in style.

The final product is a custom WordPress-based platform that totally transforms how meal prep companies operate, offering a fully flexible environment superior to the constraints of standard e-commerce templates. We overhauled the user experience to prioritize clarity and speed, introducing high-fidelity meal imagery, granular nutritional information, and intuitive filtering directly into the browsing flow to answer the key questions customers were asking.

Beyond the visuals, we engineered a seamless operational loop that connects the customer journey—browsing, customizing, and tracking—with the business journey of menu creation and fulfillment. Features like fast “add to cart” actions and recurring subscriptions were implemented to reduce cognitive load, making it effortless for users to maintain their diet plans while ensuring consistent revenue for the business owners.