Joynest is a pantry management app designed to help households reduce food waste, simplify grocery planning, and make better use of what they already have. Managing a pantry is often tedious, leading to forgotten items, unnecessary duplicates, and spoiled food — all of which cost households time and money.
The solution was to design a smart, collaborative tool that automates pantry tracking, recommends recipes based on available ingredients, and generates predictive shopping lists. With a system that works across multiple household members, Joynest turns the chaos of kitchen management into a more efficient and even enjoyable process.
Problem
Households waste hundreds of dollars a year on spoiled groceries, forgotten items, and inefficient shopping habits. Pantry management is often unorganised and fragmented across individuals.
Insight
People don’t just want to save food — they want meal planning to be easier, faster, and more collaborative
Solution
Joynest is a pantry management app that helps households reduce waste and save time by automatically tracking inventory, suggesting meals based on what's on hand, and generating smart shopping lists tailored to user habits..
My role
1. UX Strategy
2. User Interview and Synthesis
3. Market Analysis and Research
4. UI Design
5. Interaction Design
Research Insights
Through user interviews and diary studies, we identified key frustrations in day-to-day pantry and grocery management. Most participants described food spoilage as a recurring problem, often stemming from a lack of visibility into what was already at home. Many also admitted to buying duplicates or forgetting essentials during store runs, leading to both waste and frustration.
Importantly, we learned that grocery management is often a shared responsibility — yet there’s rarely a shared system. Communication gaps between household members (partners, roommates, families) resulted in poor coordination and inefficiencies.
These findings clarified our direction: people don’t just want to avoid waste — they want a shared, intelligent systemthat helps them manage food smarter without adding friction to their routines.
Prototyping & Exploration
We kicked off the design phase with low-fidelity sketches and flow diagrams to explore the core functionality: inventory management, recipe recommendations, and smart shopping lists. Our early concepts focused on minimizing input effort — experimenting with features like barcode scanning, receipt uploads, and voice entry to reduce friction. We also explored how inventory could be visualized in a way that felt intuitive — grouping items into virtual shelves, tagging by use frequency, and offering reminders as items neared expiration.
The recipe and planning features were positioned not as a separate module, but as a natural extension of the pantry, designed to surface at moments of intent (e.g., just before dinner or before a shopping trip).
Results & Outcomes
The final product experience was a clean, responsive app that allows households to automatically track their inventory using receipts and barcodes, explore recipes tailored to what’s already available, and generate shopping lists powered by AI insights into their usage patterns. The design emphasized approachability, speed, and clarity — making the app a habit-forming utility for everyday planning.
From a business standpoint, Joynest opens several monetization avenues, including premium subscriptions that unlock features like advanced meal planning and dietary filters, as well as potential partnerships with grocery delivery services. The shared household access model also offers a natural path to multi-user plans and collaborative features.
Monetization Opportunities
1. Premium subscriptions (meal prep tips, advanced planning features)
2. Grocery delivery partnerships
3. Multi-user plans for households
