CookinGenie became the leading at-home chef service in its state.
Product Development, Support, Digital Marketing
The Challenge
CookinGenie sprang to life after co-founders Sabah Drabu and Abhijit Ganguly hit upon the idea of providing personal chefs on demand.
They realized that with the right technology platform, they could support local chefs and enable individuals with no time to cook access to healthy, home-cooked meals.
CookingGenie would be a complete chef-on-demand provider. They envisioned CookinGenie as a way for busy people to enjoy healthy meals cooked in their homes by a personal chef. The chef would buy all the ingredients in advance, bring them to the client’s house on the appointed day and time, cook a delicious meal, and clean up afterward.
Sabah and Abhijit needed a highly functional, easy-to-use web application to make their vision a reality. And for that, they turned to Taazaa.
The Design
Designing CookinGenie’s solution required our team to address the needs of three types of users: customers, chefs (or “Genies”), and administrators.
Customers would be able to view and select from menu items, schedule a date and time, pay for the service, see orders, check invoices, and leave reviews.
Genies needed to be able to create and define menu items, manage orders, and respond
to customers.
Administrators required the ability to manage customers and Genies, issue sign-up bonuses, and create and manage promo codes and coupons.
The Taazaa team initially explored a monolithic architecture for the CookinGenie application. However, we soon decided a microservices architecture would allow for better performance.
To create a beautiful and easy-to-use front-end, we used Angular. Angular is an open-source web application framework backed by Google.
For the back-end and database functions, we used .Net Core and Postgres. We found that Postgres offered superior performance for this application compared to other database technologies, such as MongoDB.
Other technologies included Kubernetes and Docker, ASP, jQuery, and others. To accelerate development without sacrificing quality, we utilized a DevOps methodology.
The Solution
From the very beginning of the software development lifecycle, CookinGenie trusted the Taazaa team and empowered them to make the best choices regarding the technologies used.
Our team provided a great deal of input on the direction of the product. As a result, we truly felt like stakeholders.
As a result, CookinGenie launched their business successfully, even amid the challenges of the pandemic.
Serving a large part of Ohio—including Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati—CookinGenie’s chefs offer a wide range of cuisine. Customers can use the web application to order authentic international dishes from India, Thailand, and Peru, as well as more familiar American, Italian, and Mexican fare.
Chefs can use CookinGenie to build their own “marketplace,” creating menus of foods they enjoy cooking and pairing dishes that go well together.
Customers and chefs do all scheduling and communication through the web app, so no one has to get on the phone. It’s incredibly convenient for everyone involved.
CookinGenie has retained Taazaa to continue improving and adding services to the application. We are currently revamping the website for a new release, as well as building mobile apps for both customers and Genies.
Design System
