This article was written by high school student Christina Akira Yoh.

Senior Elizabeth Frey and I released a recipe app called Chef Up! which provides users with healthy, low cost, tasty, and easy-to-make recipes that can all be made in a college dorm room. 

The idea for this application came about because among our peers, we saw a lack of ability to quickly make nutritional snacks. Going into college, we both believe that it is important to develop healthy, nutritious eating habits early. It was clear that the solution was to create a phone application that shares easily accessible, healthy, and simple-to-create recipes. Who doesn’t carry their phone around with them?

Both of us, through our experience as high school varsity athletes, deeply value the importance of eating healthy. With the transition to college, we both hope to continue maintaining healthy living and eating habits. Having a shared desire to help others as well as a penchant for entrepreneurship, we wanted to make something in which we could share our knowledge with our peers. Combining our expertise and interests in nutrition/recipe development (Christina) and computer science/app development (Elizabeth), we decided to take on the challenge of creating a simple but effective recipe app that college students can take wherever they go. Our aim is to empower college students to develop healthy lifestyle habits—one recipe at a time. 

As a result, we spent the past four months through our Catalyst class working together to make this idea a reality. On my end, it took tens of hours of research about nutrition and hundreds of trials of different recipes, while on Elizabeth’s end that meant tons of research about how to create an app and hours of prototyping, creating, and testing. Through lots of hard work and constant communication, we were finally able to publish an application we are proud of! 


On the first day of our app’s launch, it reached the 44th spot on the Food and Drink charts, which was a huge success!

The app is available for download here. Please leave your reviews/ratings on our app as we hope to improve it to better serve our audience.