- Agency: Chop Dawg
- Client: tāst
- Category: App Design — Food & Beverage
- Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Project Brief: Design a coffee discovery platform where users scan any bag, rate flavors through a four-tier vocabulary, and build a personal taste profile, supported by a Roaster Partner Portal and an internal admin app.
A food and beverage app for specialty coffee meets most people in a grocery aisle, staring at bags covered in words like "anaerobic natural." Chop Dawg designed tāst to answer with a camera scan and a taste profile that learns from every cup you rate.
The idea started with a familiar loss. You love a bag a friend brought over, and then the name slips away.
Onboarding skips coffee questions entirely. Seven picture-based prompts about music, dessert, travel, and film give you a starting profile, such as Bright and Fruity, in about 90 seconds.
The quiz result is only a first draft. Your ratings take over as you use the app.
Point your camera at a bag and a large language model reads the brand, roaster, origin, and roast level. Chop Dawg set a response target of under two seconds, and each match shows how well the coffee fits your profile.
Unsure matches come back as a best guess you can confirm or reject. If the bag isn't in the database, you add it with two fields and a first rating and get credit as its contributor once approved.
Rating stays quick. You score on a five-point scale with half steps, then tag flavors across four tiers, from broad picks like Fruity down to a personal memory layer.
Tap any flavor tag and a short explainer opens. A would-buy-again button closes out every rating.
Every scan lands in the journal with a date, even if you never rated it. Search your history and last month's favorite turns up in seconds.
The For You feed explains each pick in plain words, such as a nod to the Ethiopian coffees you rated highly. Origin profiles unlock as you rate, and brewing guides cover six methods.
Paying stays simple. Premium runs through Apple and Google's own purchase flows, and buy links send you to the roaster's site because version one has no cart.
Roasters get a web portal that works on phones, tablets, and desktops. The dashboard shows scan counts per bag, ratings, link-out taps, and the taste profiles of the people who love each coffee.
Behind the scenes, a desktop admin app lets the tāst team approve submissions and manage the flavor list without a developer. All three products come in light and dark mode.
Results & Impact
tāst turns a crowded coffee aisle into a personal record of what you like. Roasters see real taste data, and the tāst team runs daily operations on its own.
- Earned confidence: New users get a taste profile and first picks without answering a single coffee question
- Fast answers: Bag scans target a match in under two seconds
- Roaster visibility: Roasters see which taste profiles love their coffee and how often each bag gets scanned
- Operational independence: Submissions, flavor tags, rewards, and content update without an app release or an engineer
