IBD-friendly meal planner

About the project

A recipe collector app designed to gather recipes from any source and adapt them to the nutritional needs and dietary requirements of all family members—with a special focus on Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. If the app finds product–market fit, the long-term goal is to expand support to other chronic conditions.

My role in it

This is my personal side project, and I’m handling everything end-to-end: research, product design and development.

Why it matters

When you cook for a whole family and each person has different dietary needs, it becomes a serious mental load to translate recipes and build accurate shopping lists. I spend around 2 hours a week exploring new recipes, adjusting them via ChatGPT to fit our family setup, planning meals, and making lists. I know I’m not the only one doing this. I want to help others who cook for their families optimize and simplify this process.

How I'm doing it

The project started from personal frustration and was validated through online communities I’m part of for IBD patients. I collected screenshots of people sharing similar struggles—cooking different meals for everyone, trying to adjust recipes for IBD, and looking for better tools.

I combined that with my own experience and ran surveys to dig into people’s biggest roadblocks. From there, I designed flows that mirror my own workflow—while factoring in common needs I discovered across the community. I’m also working with a clinical dietitian to ensure the content and substitutions are medically sound.

I invited community members to join a waitlist, asking them to share their biggest challenges. I’m designing and testing features that directly address those pain points, and plan to launch each functionality to the specific people who mentioned it. My hope is that, because it solves a real and personal problem, they’ll be eager to try it out and share meaningful feedback.

What it's becoming

The MVP is a recipe collector: paste or upload a recipe in any format—text, photo, or video—and it gets parsed using natural language recognition. You can then adjust it for nutritional needs, get smart substitutions and household-specific recommendations, and generate a tailored shopping list.

I’m also building a custom ingredient database in collaboration with a clinical dietitian to support accurate substitutions and give relevant advice for people with chronic conditions like Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis.