Cookler
An AI assistant for chefs, built around one question: am I making money on this recipe? Talk a recipe through, snap your supplier invoices, and Cookler works out the margin on every item, then keeps it honest as prices move.
As the senior design leader on Cookler, I led the product strategy for Margin management and designed it hands-on, from the core reframe to the build-ready spec the team is shipping now, across Saudi Arabia and France.
A chef can make a beautiful cake and still lose money on it. A few run an ERP, but most are guessing: pricing by feel, from memory, and only noticing something is underwater when the month refuses to add up. The information exists, buried in a stack of supplier invoices and a head full of recipes, but nobody has time to reconcile the two.
I led Cookler's Margin management initiative end to end. I owned the product strategy, the positioning, the scope, and the market and model calls, and stayed hands-on in the craft: the flows, the margin model, the design system, and the interaction detail on every screen.
- Product strategy and positioning
- Scope, market, and model decisions
- End-to-end UX across 45 screens
- An explainable margin model
- Invoices feeding a shared price book
- Arabic right-to-left and French
An assistant for chefs, not a matching tool
The first framing asked chefs to upload an invoice for each recipe to get a margin. That put a per-recipe chore, and the whole job of matching, in the user's lap, and it buried the thing chefs actually care about: the recipe. So the framing went through a couple of iterations. Invoices quietly build a price book. Recipes read from it. You scan once and reuse everywhere, and a recipe only asks for a price when it uses an ingredient your invoices have never seen.
Capture a recipe without typing a word
The people Cookler is for run everything alone, often with limited reading time and dirty hands. So voice leads: talk the recipe through and watch each ingredient land on screen. Photo and video are there for a printed sheet or a cook in progress, and invoices arrive the same way. The keyboard is a fallback, never the starting point.
A number you can always explain
The margin is the whole product, so it can never feel like a black box. Cookler states it in plain language and money, making money, breaking even, or losing money, and every number is one tap from the prices and matches that produced it (the phones above: drag the price to watch the margin move, then open the reasoning). Ingredient costs come from the chef's own invoices, labor is prep time times a rate set once, and the chef always sets the final selling price. Cookler only recommends.
Keep every margin honest as costs drift
A margin is only true on the day it is calculated. Every scanned invoice updates the price book and shows how each supplier's prices moved. When a new invoice quietly pushes a recipe into the red, Cookler surfaces it over whatever the chef is doing, a real alert over the live screen, not a buried report, so it gets seen before it costs them.
A product earns trust in its worst moments, so I designed the unhappy paths on purpose: name the problem plainly, always offer the next step.
Invoices with price movement · a push notification on the lock screen · and the in-app notification centre
One product, Saudi Arabia and France
Cookler launches in two markets at once, so localization was a design constraint from the first screen, not a later pass. Arabic mirrors the entire interface, numerals and all, in full right-to-left. French only changes the words. Region sets currency and units together, SAR or EUR, with no separate pickers to get wrong.
Material 3, dressed in Cookler
Material Design 3 carries interaction, accessibility, and layout, so a small team did not rebuild the basics. The brand supplies the type and one strict color rule, and profitability is always spelled out in words and numbers, so meaning never rides on color alone.
Blue marks what you can touch and what makes money, red marks a loss, amber flags break-even and prices that need a look. Everything else stays grayscale, so meaning never gets noisy. Poppins carries UI and numbers, JetBrains Mono the prices, and Cairo the Arabic build.
Simplest buildable, but never simplify away correctness
I led this the way I work: set the strategy, then stay in the pixels. I owned the positioning and the scope, and stayed hands-on through the flows, the margin model, and the interaction detail, the draggable price, the live alert, the right-to-left mirror. With a small team and two markets to hit, my job was to protect scope without cheapening the product. Two rules held every decision: build the simplest thing that works, and never simplify away correctness.
That means writing down what this release computes and what it deliberately leaves for later, so engineering builds against clear rules instead of guesses. When the backend already supported composed recipes, a cake built from its own sub-recipes, I kept it out of scope so the product could ship flat and layer it on later without rebuilding the margin engine. Interactive prototypes sit behind the flows and double as the spec, so product, design, and engineering align on the real thing.
A deliberate simplification, written down for engineering
One number, in every chef's pocket
Margin management is in build now for Saudi Arabia and France: voice, photo, and video capture, an explainable margin, a self-building price book, margin-erosion alerts, and full Arabic and French. It runs on a time-boxed free trial rather than a volume cap, so the trial proves its worth before anyone pays. The team is building against the flows and interaction detail shown here, with the harder calls, matching, unit conversion, and the composed-recipe path, already reasoned through for what comes next.