How it works

Mon Chou works in three steps. You answer a few questions about yourself, your tastes, and your household just once. After that, it writes to you every day to suggest lunch and dinner, puts together the grocery list, and cooks with you step by step.

1. Getting to know each other

The first time you open the app, there’s no cold form to fill out. Mon Chou introduces itself and asks its questions right in the conversation, like someone showing up at your place.

It asks your first name, so it can call you by name in the app and in notifications. It also asks whether you’re a woman, a man, or if you’d rather not say, simply to get the wording right. Little details like that, just to make the phrasing feel natural. Your birth year is optional.

2. Three questions about your tastes

This is the heart of the app. In three screens, you check off what you like, what you’re not too keen on, and what you can’t stand.

• What you like, in green. These foods come up often.
• What you don’t really like, in yellow. Suggested rarely.
• What you hate, in red. Never suggested, no exceptions. This question is optional, you can skip it.

Then comes the household, how many adults, how many kids, how much time you have to cook on weekdays, your budget, and any allergies to keep in mind.

3. Your household, everyone’s own tastes

You create your household and add family members. Each one shares what they like and don’t like in turn, and Mon Chou will always suggest meals that suit everyone’s tastes. Members can also message each other in the app, and Mon Chou uses that to help organize the evening. Everything about the household.

4. You pick your times

The lunch idea, the dinner idea, the grocery reminders. You set the times, Mon Chou sticks to them. If you don’t want a lunch idea, you can turn it off.

5. The first evening

That very evening, Mon Chou sends you its first message. It remembers the tastes you noted, suggests a simple dish, and sets up a time to talk again tomorrow.

6. Day to day, a conversation

Mon Chou’s main screen is a conversation. The dish arrives in a bubble, with its photo, prep time, difficulty, and cost per person. You reply with a tap.

• Sounds good, and the evening gets organized.
• Something else, and it suggests another idea. After the fourth try, it warns you that next, it’s ordering a pizza.
• Let’s order in, for nights when you’re just not feeling it.
• With what I have left, to cook with what’s already in the fridge.

7. The day’s page

The Today tab is split in two. Lunch on top, discreet, shrinking to a single line once it’s passed. Dinner at the bottom, with the dish, tonight’s groceries, the time you’ll cook together, and the time you’ll eat.

8. Groceries, without even thinking about it

Each item on the list has three states, missing, bought, at home. One tap switches from one to the other. When you walk by your store and something’s missing for tonight, Mon Chou reminds you. If an ingredient is nowhere to be found, it adapts instead of getting stuck.

9. Cooking together

Cooking mode shows one step at a time, in big text, with that step’s ingredients. Timers start with a tap, up to three dishes at once, and you can talk to Mon Chou when your hands are full. At the end, « Enjoy your meal. »

10. The vote, and it learns

After the meal, three possible answers. We loved it brings the dish back in a few weeks. Meh sets it aside. Never again removes it for good. The more you answer, the better its ideas get.