Grocero
A collaborative grocery management app for shared households
Story
Grocero helps people in shared homes track groceries from purchase to use, reduce food waste, and avoid buying the same items twice.
In shared homes, food waste often starts with small coordination failures. Someone forgets what is already in the fridge. Someone else buys the same thing again. Perishable food gets pushed to the back, then quietly expires.
I designed Grocero to make grocery coordination easier without turning food tracking into another chore. The goal was not to make people manage more. The goal was to help them think less, forget less, and waste less.
Role
UX Research
UX Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Team
Solo Project
Timeline
January 2025 - May 2025
Methods
Competitive analysis
Generative interviews
Personas
Storyboarding
User flows
Paper prototyping
Moderated usability testing
Impact
3
generative interviews
3
rounds of in-person paper testing
3
rounds of remote moderated prototype testing
60%
90%
task completion improvement
20%
80%
urgent-item recognition improvement
Problem Statement
The Problem
Shared living situations often lead to food waste because groceries are managed collectively but remembered individually. People forget leftovers, lose track of expiration dates, or buy duplicates because there is no simple shared system that fits naturally into everyday life.
Why this Matters
43%
of total food waste in the U.S. happens at the household level.
A large share of that food is still edible. It is often wasted because of poor communication, improper storage, forgotten items, misjudged portions, or confusion around freshness and expiration.
The Challenge
How might we help people manage groceries efficiently without making them feel burdened?
How might we reduce food waste without requiring constant monitoring and co-ordination?
The Opportunity
Most existing tools solve only part of the problem. Some support meal planning. Some support inventory. Some support scanning. But very few help shared households answer the everyday questions that actually matter:
What do we already have?
What is about to go bad?
Who is buying what?
What needs attention right now?
Context, Users and Design Principles
At the start, I was thinking about the problem partly through the lens of better tracking. I assumed that if I made tracking feel smarter and more efficient, people would naturally want to use the product
But as the project developed, that framing became less useful on its own. The bigger issue was not just helping people track groceries better, but reducing how much effort, memory, and coordination shared grocery management required in the first place.
Who I Designed For
What these users value
(Based on User research & Testing)
A balance between automation and control
Clear visibility into what they already have
A system that helps without becoming demanding
Less duplicate buying
Less waste
Less mental overhead
A limitation in the framing
This project focuses on what individuals and households can do, not on the larger systemic causes of food waste. That is an important limitation. I was not trying to solve the full food system. I was trying to design for the everyday coordination problems that happen inside shared homes.
Competitive Analysis
To understand where Grocero could create value, I studied four existing products.
What I was looking for
I wanted to understand:
1
How existing tools handle inventory tracking
2
How they reduce manual effort
3
How they communicate urgency
4
Whether they actually support shared-household coordination.
What I found
Mealime
is strong at meal planning and grocery list generation, but it does not meaningfully support post-purchase tracking or food expiry.
NoWaste
directly supports expiry tracking, but it depends heavily on manual entry, which creates friction over time.
Pantry
Check
offers stronger visibility into inventory and kitchen management, but the experience feels dated and limited.
Yuka
uses barcode scanning well, but it is focused on product quality and nutrition rather than household coordination or food waste prevention.
Key takeaway
The gap was clear:
Planning tools help people buy food.
Inventory tools help people log food.
But shared households still lack a low-friction way to coordinate around food already at home.
This became an important turning point in the project.
Early on, it was easy for me to imagine a broader product that combined planning, tracking, recipes, donation, and more. But looking across existing products made it clear that breadth was not where the opportunity was. The stronger direction was to focus on shared-household coordination and do that well.
This insight shaped Grocero’s direction:
Generative User Research & Insights
To better understand the problem beyond my own assumptions, I spoke with real users about their grocery habits, frustrations, and routines.
Methods
a semi-structured interview script with open-ended questions,
prompts to probe for stories and examples and
observational prompts to capture how grocery behavior plays out in real settings.
I intentionally focused on lived routines rather than asking users to react to solutions too early. I wanted to understand not just what people said they wanted, but where grocery coordination actually breaks down.
What I learned
Grocero should not ask users to become inventory managers.
It should support the moments where memory and coordination usually fail.
Persona Development
Using interview transcripts, quotes, and patterns from Generative User Research , I created personas to represent recurring behaviors, frustrations, and needs.
The personas helped me move from general observations to specific design tradeoffs.
I was not designing for one ideal user. I was designing for people with different living situations, levels of effort tolerance, and mental models around grocery management.
This pushed the design toward:
Lower-effort input
Clearer group and ownership language
Simple visual hierarchy
Multiple ways to add food depending on the user’s style
User Scenarios and Storyboarding
Designing for real-life moments
I created scenarios and storyboards based on the personas to understand how Grocero would fit into real-world contexts.
Storyboard - 1
Storyboard - 2
What storyboarding clarified
Where the interaction happens
What the user is trying to do in that moment
What level of effort they are realistically willing to give
How the system should respond without slowing them down
User Flows
I began by brainstorming all of the possible actions users might take in Grocero, then narrowed them down to the core processes that mattered most.
Adding Groceries
Claim an Item to Buy
Flow mapping helped me think through edge cases, graceful failure states, and how the system should respond when users make mistakes, change their minds, or move through the experience differently than expected.
Usability Testing
PAPER PROTOTYPING
Before moving into polished screens, I tested the concept with a paper prototype to see whether the core interactions made sense at all.
I designed five task-based interactions using paper, pens, and sticky notes. Each task involved multiple actions such as tapping, scrolling, selecting, or entering information.
A young professional living with roommates
A parent managing a household
And a solo user who lives alone
User Feedback
