The Edible Chef

Posted on Thursday, November 25th, 2021

Client	Barbra Dean
Professor(s)	John Kozodoj,
Program	Interactive Media Design
Students	Jeremy Armstrong Lesley McNaughton Thanh Nha Lam Suzie Lim Vanshika Vanshika

Project Description:

Our User Experience Design (UXD) team collaborated with local entrepreneur and cannabis advocate Barbra Dean to develop an online platform providing nutritional education surrounding cannabis for her brand, The Edible Chef. An accredited chef and Food Safety trainer, Dean’s passion for education fuels her advocacy for informed cannabis use and desire to mitigate the stigma surrounding it.

Barbra was previously selling cooking equipment and apparel through her Shopify website. Additionally, she was actively posting educational content on her Instagram and Facebook accounts. However, her existing brand led her audience to believe that she was selling edibles on her online store, which was not the case as she is currently not licensed to sell cannabis products. This resulted in significant drops in commercial traffic and limited sales.

To expand her audience and increase sales, the UXD team updated her branding by developing a new style guide, recommended the setup of an educational platform to sell video courses, and redesign her Shopify website to better align with The Edible Chef’s brand and promote upcoming products.

Throughout the duration of this project, our team learned that project scopes are not always set in stone and can be subject to evolve depending on what the client needs. After speaking extensively with our client and researching her business, we discovered that the scope of the project encompassed more than a simple website redesign but involved a brand refresh and recommendations about her business model going forward. To this end, our team’s greatest challenge was to help our client refine her goals to one that best reflected her ambitions – to provide high-quality education on the culinary and nutritional uses of Cannabis for the public at large.