Most people think they’re “bad at cooking” - myself included.
But we’re not.
We’re stuck in a broken system.
Home cooking breaks down in four places, and once one fails, the rest collapse.
1. Selecting meals
You either repeat the same safe dinners or end up scrolling at 6pm.
Choice fatigue kicks in before cooking even starts.
2. Grocery shopping
Without a clear plan, shopping becomes reactive.
You forget ingredients, guess quantities, and improvise poorly.
3. Cooking meals
Phone screens go to sleep. Pages won’t stay open.
You lose your place, miss steps, and stop enjoying the process.
4. Meal repertoire
Your best meals never live together.
They’re scattered across books, websites, screenshots, and memory.
None of this is a motivation problem.
It’s a format problem.
When recipes aren’t designed for real life, cooking feels harder than it should.
Cookbooks are beautiful.
They’re also inefficient for daily cooking.
That doesn’t make them bad.
It makes them the wrong tool for repetition.
Cookbooks are designed for browsing, not systems.
They’re great for discovery.
They’re poor for habit-building.
Most home cooks don’t need more recipes.
They need fewer recipes, used more often.
That’s why cookbook recipes rarely become staples.
They’re visited, admired, then forgotten.
Online recipes are infinite.
That’s the problem.
They live across websites, apps, saved posts, screenshots, and bookmarks.
Every platform looks different. Every recipe behaves differently.
You’re always discovering.
Rarely owning.
Cooking from a screen introduces friction:
Online recipes optimise for clicks.
Home cooks need to optimise for repetition.
If you never return to a recipe, you never master it.
If you never master it, cooking never gets easier.
Recipe cards do something cookbooks and websites don’t.
They force intention.
They sit on the counter.
They don’t scroll, refresh, or distract.
Most importantly, they encourage repetition.
When you cook the same recipe multiple times:
Notes get added. Ratings get refined.
A meal moves from “something you tried” to “something you own”.
That’s how confidence is built in the kitchen.
Not all recipe cards are equal.
Many are thin, disposable, and temporary.
They’re designed to be used once, not kept.
A card worth keeping needs:
The goal isn’t novelty.
It’s permanence and timelessness.
A recipe card should feel like something you’d find in a drawer years from now and still want to cook from.
That’s the standard CardChef is built on.
Most people think better home cooking comes from better recipes.
In reality, it comes from fewer decisions.
When recipes live in one place, physically, a few quiet things start to change.
1. Choosing meals stops feeling like a task.
You flick, recognise, and decide. Familiar meals sit next to new ones, and planning feels lighter.
2. Shopping becomes clearer.
You know what you’re cooking before you enter the shop. Ingredients are familiar, and you stop second-guessing quantities.
3. Cooking slows down in a good way.
There’s no phone on the counter. No screen to wake. No page to hold open. One recipe, one card, one meal.
4. Over time, confidence builds without effort.
You repeat meals, you remember steps, and you make small adjustments. Each recipes becomes yours.
Eventually, something bigger happens.
You stop “looking for dinner ideas” and start owning a repertoire.
A small collection of meals you trust, enjoy, and return to.
The value of recipe cards isn’t speed or novelty.
It’s calmness, familiarity, and the feeling that home cooking is finally working with you, not against you.
I didn’t set out to start CardChef.
I was just frustrated with home cooking.
We cooked a lot, but it always felt slightly harder than it needed to be.
Same meals on repeat, last-minute scrolling, or recipes half-remembered.
I tried meal kits and they were fine.
Convenient, sometimes expensive, but manageable.
What surprised me was the recipe cards.
They stayed on the counter.
They were easy to follow.
They made cooking feel clearer.
So I kept them.
Then I bought more recipe cards.
Some from kits, some second-hand, some printed myself.
That’s when I noticed what was missing.
The cards were temporary.
Thin paper. Poor layout. No sense that they were meant to last.
They worked functionally, but they didn’t feel like something you’d keep, pass on, or build a collection around.
I wanted recipe cards that felt permanent.
Something you’d be happy to see on your counter every day. Something that belonged in your home.
So I started designing them.
Hundreds of small iterations later, CardChef existed.
Not as a product idea, but as the thing I wished those original recipe cards had been.
