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ZOE meal planning
Designing a new planning experience to support long-term healthy eating habits
My role
Product Design Lead
Company
ZOE
Year
2024
Background
ZOE is a science-based personalised nutrition company helping people make smarter food choices. A persistent challenge in the programme was sustaining behaviour change over time. Through a diary study, we identified meal planning as the biggest friction point preventing members from staying on track.
Planning is hard for most people, but ZOE added further complexity - balancing ZOE-friendly meals with life considerations such as family cooking, translating recommendations into action and maintaining consistency week to week. This led to a central question:
How might we make weekly planning and shopping easier, while integrating them meaningfully into the ZOE programme?
As design lead, I worked with a cross-functional team to create and evolve a new meal planning experience - shipping early iterations, embedding it as a core app feature and prototyping future directions.
Learning from members
I led interviews and a survey with over 1,100 members to understand how meal planning fitted into their lives. Three themes shaped the direction:
Planning was weekly and time-constrained
Most members planned from Friday to Sunday, but struggled to fit it into busy routines. The experience needed to align with existing weekly habits, without adding daily overhead.
Planning and shopping were cognitively expensive
Members relied heavily on shopping lists, but manually collating ingredients across recipes was time-consuming. Reducing effort at the moment of intent became critical.
Effort outweighed perceived value
Members weren’t always sure what to eat to meet weekly goals, and meal logging felt repetitive - particularly for repeat meals. Planning needed to replace effort elsewhere in the experience, not add to it.
Defining success and scope
I facilitated workshops with product, engineering, nutrition and coaching partners to align on direction, constraints and how we would measure success.
We focused on metrics that reflected habit formation:
Adoption: 40% of members add 2+ meals
Retention: 30% plan for 2+ consecutive weeks
Depth: 5+ meals planned per user per week
This helped us define a focused first release - enough to validate whether meal planning could become a sustained behaviour, while keeping scope small enough to ship, learn and iterate in-market.
I led design across two parallel streams:
Design + deliver: moving from problem framing through MVP delivery, testing and staged releases
Live + learn: using analytics, in-app feedback and member interviews to guide post-launch iteration
Running these streams in parallel helped us move quickly without over-designing upfront - learning from real usage and improving the experience over time.
Enabling confident first plans
To support first-time users, we designed onboarding that helped members create their first meal plan without starting from a blank canvas.
Our initial approach pre-populated recipe sets based on dietary preferences. While this reduced effort, members felt constrained by the lack of choice and personal relevance.
We shifted to a more flexible model - offering recommendations that members could actively choose from, including saved meals where intent was already clear.
This balance of guidance and control significantly increased first-plan conversion, reinforcing the importance of ownership in planning behaviours.
Evolving the planner
The planner enabled members to organise their weekly meals while viewing a projected ZOE score, helping them understand how planned meals aligned with their health goals. This represented a deliberate shift from ZOE’s original scoring model, which only reflected meals already eaten.
To support plan creation, we included a focused recipe carousel featuring saved and recommended meals, alongside seamless access to browsing, searching and filtering the full recipe library.
We also integrated a dynamic shopping list that automatically consolidated ingredients across planned meals, allowing members to view, check off and export their list - directly addressing one of the most cited member pain points.
A core challenge was accommodating varied planning behaviours. Research consistently showed two patterns:
Flexible planners: preferred selecting meals from a general pool
Structured planners: wanted to assign meals to specific days
Our initial structure organised meals by type, such as breakfast and dinner, leaning into flexibility while offering optional daily scheduling via the diary. While this approach performed well, ongoing feedback highlighted a need for more integrated day-level planning.
We iterated to support daily scheduling directly within the planner, while retaining an unassigned section for flexibility. This better supported diverse behaviours and laid the foundation for future builds, including diary auto-population. This update was in development at the time I left the team.
Building up each plan
To support both focused planning and casual browsing, we introduced a universal 'add to plan' action across recipes, allowing members to build their weekly plan with a single interaction.
We also aligned the experience to a weekly cadence, working closely with coaching and nutrition partners to reinforce planning as a repeatable habit rather than a one-off task.
Planning into weekly action
To make planning more action-oriented, we integrated the meal plan into ZOE’s weekly check-in - a high-intent moment where members reflect on the past week and set goals for the next.
This integration drove a significant uplift in engagement, validating the importance of meeting members at the right moment. It also informed the future roadmap - prototyping richer personalisation and insight models to help members improve their meals week by week.
Planning around ingredients
To support planning around available ingredients, we introduced an AI-powered recipe generator. Members could input ingredients and receive tailored recipes, complete with methods, images and ZOE scores.
Rather than treating this as a standalone feature, we positioned it as part of the planning system - helping members move from constraint to action without breaking flow.
Outcome and impact
The meal planning experience exceeded all initial success metrics and became a core surface for driving adherence within the ZOE programme. Planning was later positioned as a foundational part of ZOE’s 'Programs' initiative, supporting long-term dietary change through guided steps to improve weekly habits.
"This feature made me use ZOE again… The weekly meal plan allows me to plan healthy recipes for me and the whole family. Without this, I’d leave ZOE.”
ZOE member