Cuisine de Chez Nous

A passion project that became a mobile-first platform

Cuisine de Chez Nous started with a simple idea: make authentic African and Caribbean recipes accessible to everyone, everywhere. Growing up between cultures, I noticed that the rich culinary traditions of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora were underrepresented online. Most recipe platforms focused on Western cuisine, leaving millions of food lovers without a dedicated home.

I built the first iOS app in 2018 as a side project. Seven years later, it has grown into a thriving mobile platform with over 800,000 downloads across iOS and Android, serving a passionate community of home cooks around the world.

4,300+ recipes from 90+ chefs

The recipe library spans the full breadth of African and Caribbean cooking: Senegalese thieboudienne, Cameroonian ndolé, Ivorian attiéké, Haitian griot, Jamaican jerk chicken, and thousands more. Each recipe comes from a verified chef contributor, with step-by-step instructions, ingredient lists with metric and imperial measurements, prep times, and difficulty ratings.

Contributors range from professional chefs running restaurants in Paris, Dakar, and Montreal to passionate home cooks sharing family recipes passed down through generations. The platform gives them a voice and an audience.

Native mobile apps, built solo

The mobile apps are the core of the product, fully native for the best possible user experience:

• iOS built with Swift, featuring offline recipe saving, push notifications for new content, and deep linking from the web
• Android built with Kotlin, with Material Design patterns, background sync, and widget support for recipe of the day

I handle everything: architecture, UI/UX, API integration, push notification infrastructure, App Store and Play Store submissions, and ongoing maintenance. No team, no shortcuts.

Web companion and SEO

Alongside the mobile apps, a web experience runs on Next.js with a WordPress CMS backend. This combination gives content editors a familiar publishing workflow while delivering a fast, server-rendered frontend optimized for search engines.

SEO has been a major growth driver. Recipes are structured with schema.org markup, generating rich results in Google Search with star ratings, cook times, and calorie counts. The site ranks for thousands of recipe keywords in French, English, and Spanish, reaching millions of organic visitors each month.

Multilingual by design

The entire platform supports three languages: French, English, and Spanish. This is not just UI translation. Recipe content, ingredient names, cooking instructions, and SEO metadata are all localized. The i18n system handles right-to-left considerations, locale-specific number formatting, and culturally appropriate measurement units.

Pinterest and social discovery

Pinterest integration has been a powerful acquisition channel. Rich Pins pull recipe data automatically, and optimized pin images drive significant referral traffic back to the platform. Combined with social sharing features in the mobile apps, the community grows organically through the food content people love to share.

What makes it work

The secret is consistency. Seven years of weekly content updates, regular app releases, community engagement, and SEO optimization. There is no viral hack. Just a product that serves a real need for a passionate audience, built and maintained by someone who cares deeply about the mission.