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( Case study )
Most people don't run out of food. They run out of ideas. They open the fridge, see half a cabbage, two eggs and a lime, and order takeout. The ingredients sit there until they spoil.
Recipe apps don't fix this. They start from the dish: you pick something that looks good, then find out you're missing four ingredients. Planning a week of meals is a chore of its own, so most people give up after the first try.
The Fridge AI team came to Mara to flip the starting point: an app that begins with what's already in the kitchen and works backwards to dinner.
If the app already knows what's on the shelf, choosing what to cook stops being a search problem. AI can match ingredients to recipes, surface what's about to expire and show nutrients without asking anyone to type.
The hard part was keeping it easy. A food app that demands daily logging becomes another chore, and people go back to ordering in. Every flow had to take less effort than opening a delivery app.
Mara designed the full product: strategy, brand identity, UI and a design system. The app is built around three jobs:
Scan the fridge. Point the camera at your shelves or groceries, and Fridge AI recognizes the ingredients and adds them to your inventory.
Get matched recipes. AI suggests dishes from what you already have, with cook time and a match score that shows how much of each recipe you can cover.
Cook with the numbers in view. Portion controls and a breakdown of calories, fat, carbs and protein on every ingredient and recipe.
Recipes that use ingredients close to expiry come first, so the app saves food and money without asking anyone to plan ahead.
Point the camera at a basket or a shelf. Each ingredient gets a tag with calories and macros per 100 g and goes straight into My Fridge.
Sign up with email, Google or Apple from a single screen, then go straight to your fridge.
We studied how people actually decide what to cook: what they keep on hand, what stops them from trying new recipes, and why most food apps feel like more work than ordering in.
Choosing is harder than cooking. The real friction is the decision, so the app has to make that call in seconds.
Typing kills the habit. Manual entry is where food apps lose people, so capture had to be a single photo.
What's already out there. We reviewed recipe, meal-planning and nutrition apps to see where onboarding, logging and recipe discovery break down.
Most nutrition apps look clinical: charts, tables, red warnings. We went the other way, with big close-up food photography, short copy and one accent color that reads as fresh. The numbers are there when you need them, but the food comes first.
We made the camera the main input. One photo of a shelf or a grocery basket fills the inventory, and the user only fixes what the AI got wrong.
Calories and macros matter to some people and scare off others. Each ingredient shows one large number with fat, carbs and protein beside it. The full detail is one tap away, not stacked on every recipe.
A neon-green identity, a fridge-door logo and 3D food imagery that stand out in a crowded app category.
Ingredient scanning, a My Fridge inventory, AI recipe matching, portion controls and nutrient breakdowns in one app.
Colors, type, components and screen templates, so new features don't mean redrawing the UI.
Delivered in five weeks: research, user flows, wireframes, branding, design system, UI, prototyping and animation.
We kept the main screens to the few things that matter at the fridge door: scan, choose, cook. Profiles, settings and saved recipes sit one tap away, so the app never feels like a dashboard you have to manage.
Warm, tactile food shots with the neon green as a constant, so every image reads as Fridge AI.
Personal info, preferences and saved recipes kept out of the main flow, one tap from the home screen.
A cooking app gets used at arm's length, often with busy hands. That shaped the details: large tap targets, high-contrast type and one main action per screen.
