Cuisine de Chez Nous

Why I built it

In 2015, I was looking for African recipes online and realized there was almost nothing. No dedicated app, no structured platform. Western cuisine had dozens of apps with thousands of recipes. African and Caribbean cooking had none.

I started a Facebook group to fill the gap. It grew to over 1 million members. People were sharing recipes every day, but the format was messy: photos in comments, ingredients buried in threads, no way to save or search anything. The community needed a real product.

So I built the app. First on Android, then iOS. Today it has over 800,000 downloads, more than 4,300 recipes from 90+ verified chefs, and is one of the most well-known African recipe platforms. From Senegalese thieboudienne to Jamaican jerk chicken, Cameroonian ndolé to Haitian griot.

How it's built

The app started as two separate native apps: Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android. Maintaining two codebases solo became unsustainable, so I migrated everything to React Native with Expo. One TypeScript codebase, two platforms.

The architecture is MVVM: Expo Router for file-based navigation, Zustand for state management, TanStack Query for data fetching and caching. The backend is a WordPress CMS exposed through its REST API, which lets chefs publish recipes through a familiar interface.

On the web side, a Next.js frontend serves recipes with server-side rendering, schema.org markup for rich Google results, and full SEO optimization in three languages (French, English, Spanish). Pinterest Rich Pins and social sharing drive organic growth.

Analytics run through PostHog and Firebase. Monetization is through Google AdMob. Push notifications keep users engaged with new recipes. The whole platform supports three languages with i18next, not just UI labels but recipe content, ingredients, and cooking instructions.

What's next

The next step is adding in-app subscriptions for a premium experience: ad-free browsing, exclusive chef content, and meal planning. I'm also working on an AI-powered recipe assistant that suggests recipes based on ingredients you have at home. And I want to bring video content into the app, since cooking is better shown than described.