IntroducingLiving Plate Rx

The industry’s most comprehensive evidence-based nutrition content solution.

4-8 weeks

product discovery
& design phase

6months

development phase

inTop 5

meal planners

3k+

active users for all services

Location

US & Canada

Expertise

Product discovery

UX/UI design

Product management

Development

Testing

Living Plate Rx, founded by Jeanne Petrucci, MS, RDN, is a significant player in the culinary and nutrition business. With over 12 years of experience, Jeanne's journey from a culinary coach to an expert nutrition educator and a registered dietitian led to the creation of Living Plate Rx. This platform is a vital support system for the healthcare and wellness professionals community, offering a complete nutrition content solution.

It provides evidence-based culinary nutrition content through proprietary meal planning software, digital nutrition courses, and a library of culinary nutrition content practitioners need for their practices.

Living Plate Rx’s main goal is to provide science-backed content and guidance for practitioners, allowing them to focus fully on growing their expertise and practice. The content is white-labeled and editable, allowing practices and institutions to project the highest level of professionalism.

With a strong focus on user experience and engagement, Jeanne approached us to help her enhance the current user base on the Living Plate Rx platform. She envisioned a robust and modern technical solution that would scale her services and cater to new features, new partnerships, and the acquisition of new customer segments.

The challenge

01Building a unified platform foundation

After mapping out the existing solution, we discovered that the Living Plate Rx platform was divided into two tools, each with separate logins, user flows, and designs. Our challenge was to create a unified and streamlined platform for a seamless user experience.
We needed to develop a design system applicable to both tools. By leveraging our custom-built LMS, we successfully integrated the library and meal planner, establishing an easily accessible and unique platform feel.
We also created a home hub to serve as the centerpiece for future integration of the meal planner into the new library, ultimately transforming LPRX into a single cohesive platform.

02User-friendly library redesign

We recognized the need to reorganize the library's informational layout, primarily dictated by the existing LMS solution LPRX was using. Our challenge was to do this delicately, as most platform users were non-tech-savvy and resistant to change.
We employed familiar navigation patterns, naming conventions, and layouts to facilitate the transition. This approach eased the transition for current users and provided a versatile, reusable white-label solution for potential licensing partners.
Additionally, we enhanced the onboarding process with robust customer support features and a comprehensive product tour of the revamped platform.

Our product approach

Our evaluation of the Living Plate Rx platform revealed that it is not a singular tool but a combination of two distinct solutions. One is a custom-developed meal planner, while the other is an off-the-shelf LMS solution serving as a content library. This unique setup facilitated the platform's growth but presented challenges for future scalability.

4-8 week phase of product discovery and design

Our journey began with a 4-8 week phase of product discovery and design, during which we honed in on the objectives of our initial development phase. Thanks to the community's active participation, we gathered feedback from current users. This user feedback and the client's business objectives formed the basis of our initial product hypotheses. We then put these hypotheses to the test in user interviews, using a prototype to gather qualitative feedback.

Six-month development phase

Once we had a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve, we finalized the designs and moved to the six-month development phase. During this phase, we used the agile development framework, with two-week sprints and regular client demo sessions.

Our tech
approach

After initial research into possible CMS usage, we built our custom solution tailored to customer needs. We used knowledge gained from creating similar products in the past. In the first cycles, we focused on building core components, which were effectively used across the project in various functionalities. After the first few weeks, we could use these components as building blocks to construct the UI like a puzzle.

Each component also had its own Storybook file, allowing designers and product managers to check them in an isolated environment and simulate different cases.

We did not split the work between backend and frontend developers; instead, we utilized the power of full-stack development. Each developer handled the backend, API, front end, and tests for the functionality they were responsible for. This approach helped keep the team unblocked and working efficiently.

We divided the release into two parts: one for the admin interface and the second for the customer-facing app. During the first admin release, we identified and addressed some issues and change requests before the public launch. The client could use the app to upload content, so the public launch was smooth and free of significant issues.

Results

Our collaboration with Living Plate Rx transformed their platform into a seamless, unified experience. We enhanced user accessibility with a user-friendly library redesign and improved onboarding. The manual data migration ensured a smooth transition without disrupting users. As a result, Living Plate Rx now serves over 3000 paying users and ranks in the Top 5 meal planners. Our solutions enabled Living Plate Rx to support healthcare and wellness professionals better, allowing them to focus on their practice while leveraging high-quality, science-backed nutrition content.

Tech
stack

Front-end

Next.js (React.js)

ShadcnUI

Back-end

Apollo GraphQL

PostgreSQL

Infrastructure

AWS