Recipes.co.nz

By Taylor Abernethy-Newman & Dave Chhour

Recipes.co.nz: Bringing excitement and pride to the kiwi kitchen

Project Shots

Search for recipes based on ingredients you have in the kitchen

A recipe inner page featuring interactive method steps, ingredients, nutritional information and more

Featured professional kiwi chefs, home cooks and food writers who contribute recipes

A drag and drop weekly meal planner

Mobile recipe inner

Editing environment

Recipe inner Schema

The editor for each method step allowing a timer to be setup on the front end

An existing url field so that pre launch we were able to scrape and import all meta data automatically

About the project

Challenge

How do you stand out from the competition when you’re competing against every recipe website in the world? That was the challenge that we were set when Beef and Lamb New Zealand, the owners of one of New Zealand’s most popular recipe websites www.recipes.co.nz, approached us looking for a fresh and ambitious vision for their food inspiration brand.

Approach

As always our approach hinged around walking in the shoes of the people who would be using the website. Through research and workshopping, we identified three core triggers for use of the site:

1. The desire to find a specific recipe;
2. The desire to find recipes that match what the user had in the pantry and
3. The desire to find inspiration for meal occasions.

Using these three trigger points – and with clearly defined design principles that focused on discoverability, personalisation and craft – we architected relevant user journeys and began the process of creating an intuitive experience purpose built for the Kiwi kitchen.

Results

With a fresh new look and feel, lighting fast page speeds thanks to a cutting edge headless tech stack, fully optimised search engine visibility, a hugely improved user experience purpose-built for Kiwi cooks and hugely positive initial feedback from stakeholders and users alike , the new recipes.co.nz platform is sure to be more than just a flash in the pan.

But this is just the starter. While the foundations have been laid, we’re continuing to work with the Beef and Lamb team to create a product roadmap that will allow for the regular addition of new, innovative features. Now that’s something for us to get our teeth into.