Meet the co-founder

I wanted it all in one app: recipes, micronutrients, meal plan, shopping list. It didn't exist, so I built it.

Six years ago, right as Covid started, I stopped eating meat. No documentary, no big moral awakening, no dramatic moment. I just didn't want it anymore.

Quitting was easy. Dinner was the problem. I've never been into cooking. I care about what I eat, I just don't think cooking should take your whole day. Between a busy corporate job and my hobbies, I had no time or energy left in the evenings to hunt for recipes, let alone plan a week of meals. For years my system had been meat plus a side. Now I just had the side.

A few weeks in, I kept hearing the same line from people around me and all over the internet: "You can't get all your nutrients without meat." I got sick of it. Which nutrients? Nobody knew. Take B12. Take iron. Take nothing, a good diet covers it. I ended up buying supplements I wasn't sure I needed. Now I know most meat-eaters fall short on something too. The question was never "meat or no meat". It was "which foods are the most nutrient-dense, and how much of each gets me everything I need throughout the day?"

I went looking for an app that could answer both: what do I eat, and is it giving my body what it needs? Meal planners counted calories and stopped there. The best nutrient tracker I found looked great on a computer, but I plan and shop on my phone, and on a phone it was a struggle. No plant-based recipes. No way to turn a week of meals into a grocery list. Nothing did all of it.

For a long time, it was just an idea in my head. I came from marketing, not tech. I knew exactly what I wanted the app to do but had no idea how to build it. So I grabbed a pen and started sketching it on paper. I still have those pages. Then I went looking for a way to make it real, and this was back before AI could write half the code for you.

It took a while. But today Vegochef looks the way we pictured it and does what we set out to do. We're not done, though. We have big plans, and your feedback decides what we build next.