Zestey Plan

A Recipe for Success through Strategic Support

Zesty Plan needed its AI powered recipe app finished for a live demo at the Collision Conference, with a month to go and no in house developers. Ollon placed two developers on the team to extend features, test, and polish the app before the presentation. Zesty Plan's demo grew its following and led to a second showcase at Collision 2024.

Situation

Zesty Plan had a vision of creating an app that would generate recipes and were in the early stages of development as they were preparing to demo at the Collision Conference.

Solution

Ollon provided scalable support staff, supplementing their team to assist Zesty Plan in preparing their app for the presentation. This included extending features, providing testing and polish, and ensuring the app could showcase its ability to create healthy and tasty recipes which can be shared with family and friends. Recipes are created with large language models, using a list of ingredients, a photo, or a description, all while incorporating your dietary preferences.

Results

Ollon's flexible support allowed Zesty Plan to successfully showcase their app to over 40,000 attendees, leading to a significant increase in their follower count. Initially helping with Collision 2023, the success of that event led to ongoing collaboration throughout the year. Using a flexible resourcing model, Ollon assisted Zesty Plan in adding new features, culminating in a major push before Collision 2024, where the app's exposure and positive reception further expanded its user base.

Technologies

Cordova, Vite, Svelte, Supabase, Typescript

Our Expertise in Action

Team augmentation and staff scaling

Zesty Plan's founder had a vision for an AI powered meal planning app but wasn't a developer, and reached out to Ollon for the technical expertise to build it. Ollon placed two developers on the front end of a five person team, working alongside an internal developer who owned the database and the founder, who set product direction. That structure let Ollon's developers own the entire front end build independently, without waiting on a larger internal team to be assembled first. This gave a founder without a technical background the capacity to take an early idea to a build ready to demo.

MVP development and product-market fit

Zesty Plan needed a working MVP of its AI powered meal planning app in time for a live demo at Collision 2023, a major tech conference. By the time development was well underway, the app could generate a recipe from an AI prompt, build out a full week's meal plan from those recipes, generate a grocery list from the plan, and let users plan multiple weeks ahead through a built in calendar, with a manual option for users who preferred to skip the AI. The finished MVP was demoed to more than 40,000 conference attendees, drove a meaningful jump in Zesty Plan's following, and led to a continued collaboration that carried through a second showcase at Collision 2024.

AI Integration

Zesty Plan's app is built around a simple idea, letting a user type a plain language prompt, like a request for a carbonara or pizza recipe, and turning that into a full recipe using a large language model. Behind the scenes, Ollon's developers sent that prompt to the AI model and returned the generated recipe to the user. The harder part of the work was tuning the model specifically for that use case, so its responses reliably stayed focused on generating recipes and grocery lists that matched a user's dietary preferences. That tuning let Zesty Plan offer AI generated recipes and shopping lists that consistently matched what users actually asked for.

Mobile Application Development

Zesty Plan needed its meal planning app built out fast, ahead of a hard deadline for a conference demo, using Cordova and Svelte on the front end and Supabase on the backend, choices that weren't especially mainstream at the time. The main technical challenge was getting Supabase, a newer backend platform similar to Firebase, to work cleanly with that front end stack. Cordova and Svelte were built to make app development approachable for people without coding experience, so much of the underlying behavior was fixed by the platform, leaving limited room to customize directly. Working through those constraints, Ollon still delivered a functioning app ready for the conference deadline.