Bringing homemade Nigerian food online for a brand-new business in Groningen — turning a scattered Instagram-and-WhatsApp operation into a website people can browse, trust, and order from with confidence.
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Role
Product Designer — end-to-end UX/UI
Timeline
2026 · WBS Coding School
Tools
Figma · FigJam · Google Forms
Deliverable
Responsive ordering site + design system
Client
Drip & Dine, Groningen
Team
Team of two, with a fellow designer
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Drip & Dine is a small Nigerian home kitchen in Groningen that lived entirely on Instagram and WhatsApp. We gave it a home of its own: a warm, trustworthy website where students and food lovers can browse the menu, pre-order, and pick up a freshly cooked meal without ever feeling lost.
Drip & Dine is run by a couple in Groningen — one cooks Nigerian food with real love, the other runs the business side. When we met them they had no website, no finalised logo, and no real way to take orders beyond DMs and group chats. They were planning a soft launch over the summer, when the student city fills up, with a proper opening in September.
This was not a hypothetical brief. It was a real business about to launch, with real constraints, a budget of roughly zero, and a founder who told us plainly that she was not comfortable managing a website herself. That changed how I approached everything: I was not designing a beautiful concept, I was designing something a busy person could actually run.
The founders had a clear problem — and a few uncomfortable truths sitting on top of it. There was no easy way to get homemade Nigerian food in Groningen, and Drip & Dine had no online presence to change that. Orders scattered across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook groups were hard to manage and easy to lose.
The uncomfortable truths surfaced in the founder interview:
It is pickup only, not delivery — the founders had no time to drive food around the city. The address stays hidden until payment, for privacy. The kitchen cooks in batches, so when the jollof is gone, it's gone for the day. And the core audience is students, who in the founder's words "don't necessarily have the time to be looking on a website ordering food."
So the brief got sharper than "build a food website." It became:
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How do we make a pickup-only, batch-cooked, address-hidden, brand-new business feel effortless and trustworthy to a student who wants dinner sorted in under a minute?
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Tools: FigJam for collaborative synthesis · Google Forms for fast, free survey reach across Groningen · recorded founder interview.
I did not want to design from assumptions, especially for a cuisine and a city I was building for rather than living in. So we started by listening in two directions at once — to the business and to the people who might buy from it.