Meet CHOPCHOP - your digital kitchen assistant

An Imperial student is part of a team who have just launched CHOPCHOP, a new cooking app to help you plan your way to culinary success.

CHOPCHOP saves you from the stress of cooking chaos, acting as the ultimate kitchen assistant to guide you through the cooking process. 

The app, which is now available free for iOS, lets you select the dishes you want to cook and the number of people you’re serving, and then creates a full plan to make sure your meal is ready with ease.

CHOPCHOP not only gives step by step instructions for the cooking process, it also creates a shopping list of required ingredients, and tells you when you need to start preparing each dish.

The brainchild of JinA Bae and Johnson Wang, the idea for the app came during a road trip along the Great Ocean Road in South-East Australia.

“We relied a lot on the GPS on the drive and we got to thinking about applying that same type of dynamic guidance to other areas of life.” JinA said, “Johnson and I are both into cooking and we saw the potential of an app to optimise that process and take a task management approach into the kitchen.”

The pair took their idea to Start-up Weekend at Google Campus in 2014 where they met co-founders Sergio Cecarini, George Trevill and Imperial PhD student Max Frenzel. 

Max said: “My PhD is in Quantum Information Theory, which is quite an interdisciplinary area of research connecting many different fields in new and creative ways. When I heard about CHOPCHOP at Startup Weekend I immediately liked it, and thought I could contribute. I really enjoyed applying my mathematical and problem solving skills to a very real problem like cooking.” 

As the project developed, the team entered into Imperial Create Lab’s Venture Catalyst Challenge (VCC), a pre-accelerator programme for early stage start-ups. 

“The VCC was the first start-up programme we took part in.” said JinA, “It was really useful as it gave us access to a lot of great mentors.

“We’ve had a lot of support from Imperial and the VCC – it’s great to be able to tap into this network of expertise.”

Max added: “Imperial has some great resources and programmes for start-ups, and my research and experience at Imperial prepared me very well for tackling new problems in all sorts of areas, not just traditional physics ones from my academic course.”

Following its launch the team are continuing to work on CHOPCHOP, optimising its performance and developing new features to further guide the cooking experience.

CHOPCHOP is available to download from the App Store for iOS.