Carbon Counting

2018

Freelance work from 2018, through Stephan Ye Design. The craft has moved on since. The problem hasn't.

Bistro Carbon guest app showing a dish detail with its climate score — Each dish paired with its climate score, right where a guest is deciding what to order

CarbonCloud, led by food and climate researchers, helps producers and restaurants calculate the climate impact of what they serve. As a Product Designer, I spent 6 months turning customer research into a tool chefs could use daily and diners could trust.

Kitchens are unpredictable. Dishes change with what's in season, what sold out at lunch, what a supplier swapped in. Chefs needed to log climate impact as fast as they built the menu, not as a separate chore afterward.

Mobile dish editor for Beef Bourguignon, from description to ingredient search — The dish editor, built mobile-first for a hand at a prep station, not a desk

The dish editor became mobile-first: add an ingredient, watch the CO2 estimate update, done. The same editor scaled up to a full week's planner on desktop, for the manager laying out the whole menu at once.

Week Menu Planner desktop view listing a restaurant's full weekly menu — A week's worth of dishes, each with its own climate rating

On the restaurant side, a dashboard turned that same data into something the business could act on, emissions, wasted portions, and revenue side by side.

CarbonCloud restaurant dashboard showing climate emissions, dish performance, and revenue — Kitchen data turned into decisions: emissions, waste, and revenue in one view

Once a menu was set, it had to reach the people eating it. The web app translated each plan into printed menus and the guest-facing app, shareable via API, so a diner choosing between two dishes could see the climate difference before ordering.

Printed restaurant menus beside the matching guest-facing phone app — One menu plan, two outputs: a printed sheet for the table, an app for the guest's phone