CASE STUDY

Freshii

A white-label app, rebuilt from scratch into an ordering platform Freshii could call its own.

TIMELINE

3.8 years · 2021—24

ROLE

Sole Product Designer, later Designer + PM

TEAM

In-house Product, Design & Tech Ops · remote eng

PLATFORMS

iOS · Android · Web

OVERVIEW

One designer, one remote dev team, a whole app.

When I joined, Freshii's app wasn't really Freshii's. It ran on a white-labeled platform — the same ordering shell dozens of other brands used. It was expensive to maintain, every update crawled through a vendor, features lagged, and the experience showed it. Over the next 3.8 years I redesigned and rebuilt the ordering experience end to end, as the company's only designer and, later, as a product manager too.

The new app's first impression — brand moments, flexible sign-up, and location handled for every permission state.

THE CHALLENGE

Replace the rented app — without dropping a single order.

The mandate was to own the platform. That meant designing a complete ordering experience from zero, for a live national brand, with real stores and real guests depending on it every day.

Vendor lock-in

A white-label shell that was costly to run and slow to change — every update went through someone else.

Missing features

No real loyalty, gift cards, delivery, or promotions — the table stakes of a modern food app.

Poor experience

Customization, the heart of Freshii's menu, was clumsy where it needed to feel effortless.

Team of one

No established design process, a remote dev team, and stakeholders in ops, marketing, and leadership.

GETTING IN

Never block the menu.

The old app put a wall in front of hungry people. We rebuilt the entry around one rule: browse first, commit later. A guest can find a store, build a bowl, and only then be asked who they are — and every answer to the location prompt, detected, entered, or denied, has a designed path.

Guest flow — browsing the menu and choosing a store before signing up — The guest flow — locate, browse, and order before sign-up ever appears.

THE CORE

The bowl is the interface.

Freshii's menu is built on customization — swap, add, remove. This is where the white-label app fell shortest and where we invested most. Every ingredient is visible, editable, and priced, calories carry through the whole flow, and dietary filters and allergens are a tap away. Store selection got the same care: map and list views, live pickup times, and menus that respect what each location actually serves.

Bowl customization — replace, remove, add ingredients with pricing and calories — Customizing a bowl — replace, remove, add, with transparent pricing and calories throughout.

Custom bowl builder from base to dressing — Building a bowl from scratch — base, toppings, premium toppings, dressing.

Menu with dietary filters and nutrition info — Dietary filters, nutrition, allergens.

Store selection with map and live pickup times — Store selection with live pickup times.

MONEY

Checkout, payments, and loyalty — on one screen.

Checkout is where trust is won or lost, so we kept it on one screen: order details, cutlery, promos, points, tips, and payment, each editable in place. Around that spine sit Apple Pay and Google Pay, saved cards, gift cards with scan-to-pay and auto-reload, split payment, and the Energii points program — with every promo edge case designed as a state, not an error toast.

Checkout flow — add card, select payment, place order — Checkout — one screen, every payment path designed.

Split payment across gift card and credit card — Split payment — gift card plus card, without the math.

Gift cards — scan to pay, add funds, auto reload, transfer balance — Gift cards — scan-to-pay in store, add funds, auto-reload, balance transfer.

THE HARD PART

When the real world disagrees with the order.

The deepest design work was the least glamorous: an address outside the delivery range, a store that closes before your pickup, breakfast items in a lunch cart, a delivery time that shifts after you hit place order. We designed the unhappy paths at the same fidelity as the happy ones — auto-switching stores, offering pickup when delivery can't happen, and conveying time changes honestly. Operations lived in these flows with us.

Delivery flow from address entry to placed order — Delivery — from first address to placed order.

Screens conveying a changed pickup or delivery time — Conveying a changed pickup/delivery time — visible, honest, actionable.

EVOLVING

Ship it, then never stop.

Owning the platform turned vendor negotiations into a release cadence we controlled. After launch the app kept earning its keep: checkout refinements from what we observed, cart upsell and build-a-combo, in-app messaging for offers and win-back, referral, and security work like 2FA and account deletion — the unglamorous features a real product accrues.

Build-a-combo upsell — add a drink and a snack — Build-a-combo — upsell designed as a favour, not an ambush.

In-app messaging — surveys, offers, referral, win-back.

OUTCOME

From renting an app to owning a platform.

Freshii went from a generic rented shell to a platform designed around its actual menu, stores, and guests — shipping on the team's schedule, with loyalty, gift cards, delivery, and promotions the white-label product never offered. It changed my role too: from October 2022 I took on product management alongside design, leading initiatives across Foodtastic brands including Quesada, Second Cup, and Pita Pit. Owning one product end to end for three-plus years is the closest thing design has to compound interest.