The Kitchen Adventure
Fostering Behavior Change and Improving Healthy and Sustainable Nutrition Through a Digital App
Solution Overview
The challenge
The decline in home cooking has led to worsening public health and environmental outcomes.
Families increasingly rely on ultra-processed foods, which are linked to diet-related diseases (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, obesity) and significant environmental degradation due to unsustainable food production.
Barriers include a lack of cooking inspiration, time constraints, cooking being seen as a chore, and limited engagement of children in meal preparation.
Users/Testers
30+ dedicated users via a closed beta platform. Over 2,000 people engaged on social media, many of whom participated in feedback and informal testing. Pilot impact tracking is ongoing, with user retention and behaviour change still under evaluation. Target sample size: 1,000 for meaningful data.
The solution
The Kitchen Adventure is a gamified mobile app designed to promote healthy, sustainable home cooking through personalised experiences and family engagement.
Core functionalities include:
- Personalised nutrition plan: Suggests recipes tailored to user profiles, dietary needs, and eco-score considerations.
- Gamification elements: Eco-score levelling, challenges, avatars, badges, and leaderboards to motivate behaviour change.
- AI cooking assistant: “Chef Mandula”, an AI hedgehog offering tips, ingredient substitutions, and cooking help.
- Interactive features: Step-by-step cooking guides, grocery lists with barcode scanner, calorie and nutrition tracking.
- Live cooking events: Real-time chef-led sessions to build community and improve skills.
- Multilingual support: Available in English and Hungarian, with expansion planned
Users/Testers
30+ dedicated users via a closed beta platform. Over 2,000 people engaged on social media, many of whom participated in feedback and informal testing. Pilot impact tracking is ongoing, with user retention and behaviour change still under evaluation. Target sample size: 1,000 for meaningful data.
Members
Hungary
The Netherlands
Citizen Engagement
Activities and Methods:
- Workshops (needs assessment & co-creation) in Hungary, the Netherlands, and Lithuania.
- Surveys: Over 600 responses from parents across several countries.
- Beta testing: Via a dedicated platform with guided test cases and feedback forms.
- Panel discussions: On AI, data awareness, and digital food solutions.
Numbers:
- Total engaged: 853 individuals
- Needs assessment workshops: 109 participants
- Co-creation workshops: 94 participants
- Online survey (3 countries): 568 participants
- Hungarian survey: 74 participants
- AI/data awareness seminar: 18 participants
- Social media community: 2000+ followers
DataU and FOODITY components
Personalised nutrition plan: Adapted from FOODITY to offer single-dish recommendations. Provided the foundation for backend logic and recipe structure.
Barcode scanner (food product identification): Improving usability in the nutrition tracker.
Results and achievements
Tangible improvements
- Increased awareness: Raised user understanding of healthy eating, sustainability, and data privacy through gamified features and DataU onboarding.
- Behavioural change: Families cooked more often together, tried plant-based meals, and engaged with eco-score challenges.
- Efficiency gains: Users saved time with auto-generated grocery lists, barcode scanning, and cooking tips from the AI assistant.
Impact Indicators
Data collection is still in progress to achieve a reliable sample size for analysis.
Outputs produced
- Features developed: Personalised recipe engine, AI assistant (Chef Mandula), nutrition tracker, eco-score gamification, multilingual support, live cooking events, and secure consent management.
- Services launched: Beta testing platform, social media channels (2,000+ followers), live online classes.
- Datasets generated: Three anonymised, GDPR-compliant datasets on cooking habits and user needs uploaded to the FOODITY Data Lake.
Feedback from users
- AI assistant ("Chef Mandula") was well received, especially among children. Users enjoyed the interactive tips and substitution suggestions.
- Gamification (eco-scores, badges, challenges) increased motivation, especially among families with children.
- Personalised recipes were appreciated for aligning with user preferences and dietary needs.
- Cooking Instructions were seen as clear and accessible, especially age-appropriate steps for kids.
Social/environmental/economic impact
- Social impact: Encourages healthier eating habits, especially among families, through gamified learning and child-friendly features. Improves food literacy and digital engagement.
- Environmental impact: Promotes plant-forward diets and sustainable food choices using eco-score gamification. Helps reduce meat consumption and food waste.
- FOOD 2030 alignment: Nutrition for Sustainable and Healthy Diets: Promotes balanced, plant-based eating.
- Food systems supporting a healthy planet: Shifts behaviour toward low-impact meals.
- Circularity and resource efficiency: Encourages meal planning to reduce waste.
- Innovation & empowering communities: Uses AI and gamification to educate and engage citizens.
Materials and links
Alignment with FOODITY
Data sovereignty & transparency: Uses DataU for GDPR-compliant consent; users control their data and are informed about its use.
Citizen engagement: 850+ participants in surveys, workshops, and beta testing; strong social media presence and live events.
Food ethics: Promotes plant-based, sustainable cooking with eco-score gamification and chef-tested recipes.
Inclusivity: Multilingual, family-friendly design with personalised features for various dietary needs.
Responsible data use: Anonymised data supports food and sustainability research.
Lessons and recommendations
Lessons learned
- Early testing of third-party components is critical.
- Iterative design works: Continuous feedback loops helped refine features and improve usability quickly.
- Simplicity wins: Users preferred streamlined, single-dish suggestions over complex meal plans, reinforcing the value of focusing on practical needs.
Recommendations
- Respect data rights: Integrate GDPR-compliant tools early; ensure multilingual support and transparency.
- Engage users continuously: Use co-design and testing to shape features and improve UX.
- Keep it practical: Focus on simple, useful features such as single-recipe suggestions and a clear UI.
- Design for localisation: Make features adaptable for different cultures, diets, and languages.
- Gamify with purpose: Use rewards and eco-scores to boost engagement—but explain them clearly.
- Build to scale: Use scalable architecture and collect anonymised data to support future research.
Main benefit of participating in the FOODITY Programme
The FOODITY Programme provided the resources and structure to turn an idea into a fully functional, scalable solution. It enabled us to implement key features and prepare for market launch with a clear exploitation strategy. Without FOODITY, the Kitchen Adventure app would not have reached its current maturity.