You know exactly what good food should look and taste like. Yet here you are again, standing in front of an open fridge on a random Tuesday night, no plan in your head and nothing in there matching the plan you didn’t have. Somewhere in the fridge still sits a container with a well-intentioned but expired meal prep, abandoned around the time the fourth identical lunch made you want to throw the whole thing in the bin. You already fear what this month’s takeout total is going to look like, so you’re choosing not to look closer. You’d cook properly if there were an hour to spare most nights, but there almost never is. And even on the nights you actually do cook, competently, pan in hand and the knife the right way round, it still somehow doesn’t taste like it was supposed to.
Sound familiar? Or at least some of it? Under the hood it’s actually all the same problem: wanting to eat good food at home and actually having it, right when you need it, keep missing each other by a mile.
It’s a problem that I’ve personally been dealing with for over a decade. I’m living a wonderfully busy, dynamic and unpredictable life that I wouldn’t change for a moment, but eating genuinely great food at home clearly suffers. Time to properly cook at home during the week is sparse, when I do it seldom ends up like intended, meal prepping doesn’t support my ever-changing appetite, and I spend way more on takeout that I like to admit.
Mise & Match exists to finally close that gap.
Here’s the thing about the best restaurant kitchens in the world: they have no idea when you’re walking through the door, or what you’ll be craving. And yet the food is good, every single time.
How they do it? Simple: Mise en Place.
Properly preparing proteins, grains, sauces, and vegetables in advance, on a schedule that suits the kitchen rather than the customer. That way, the moment someone orders, everything’s already there. Assembly takes minutes, while nothing gets rushed to make it happen.
I started running my own kitchen the same shameless way, just without an overworked sous-chef yelling at me to hurry up. How? By preparing different meal components whenever I actually had a spare hour, without deciding yet what dish they’d eventually become. Then, whenever I required a genuinely good meal at home, the answer to my cravings was already in the fridge waiting for me.
That one change fixed many problems at once, which I genuinely didn’t expect going in. The empty evening food panics disappeared, because there was always something ready to become dinner. The boring and repetitive meals disappeared too, since a couple of different components could turn into a variety of meals across the week. My at-home takeout spending quietly dropped to almost zero, creating more room to save or meaningfully spend money elsewhere. Most nights also turned into merely assembling meals rather than actually cooking them, so the time I’d spent prepping upfront ultimately came back as well. And because I was finally cooking on moments where I could actually dedicate my time and focus to it, without a twenty-minutes-until-hangry countdown breathing down my neck, the food genuinely started tasting like I knew what I was doing.
I’m a product manager building and managing complex IT systems for a living, so creating an app around this newfound approach felt like a meaningful passion project. That way I could get a place to properly store my meal component recipes, as well as develop an automated system to efficiently help me out with component prepping, inventory management, and finding the best meal options.
When friends started watching me throw together some genuinely great meals in minutes while using the app, they wanted in as well and would happily pay for it. From that point on, the user base has grown ever since.
That’s the entire origin story. Not a market opportunity I spotted, but just a frustrating problem I had, solved selfishly for myself first, and which turned out to not be mine alone after all.
Mise & Match is named after the exact practice that saved my evenings, and every out-of-the-box meal component you’ll find in it has been cooked, tasted, and personally approved by me. You can tweak any of them to suit your own taste and dietary preferences, or build something entirely your own from scratch and share it with the people you actually cook for.
Want to give it a try? Your first prep session is free, no card required. If the app works for you the way it worked for me, a subscription runs €12,99 every four weeks, dropping by €1 for every week you complete a prep session, all the way down to €8,99. The app gets cheaper the more it earns its place in your week, which felt like the only fair way to price it. You’ll find it also pays itself back immediately the first time you’re saving on expensive takeout.
You can cancel your subscription and come back whenever you like, no explanation required and no guilt trip on the way out. I’m confident about the long-term value the app can bring to your life, so I believe you should be able to temporarily halt your subscription if your life suddenly demands it.
I also want to be honest: This app isn’t for everyone, and I’d rather just say that outright than pretend otherwise. If you love following a recipe from start to finish, or you’re genuinely happy cooking from scratch most nights, you’re already in good hands elsewhere. This app works best for those people whose lives are generally too busy, dynamic or unpredictable that wanting good food at home and actually having it are constantly at odds, but who refuse to give up on that.
If that’s you, you probably already knew it by the second paragraph. So try one prep session for free, and then see what your fridge and week look like when the app is actually on your side. Just make sure you bring enough tupperware and ziplock bags, because the food doesn’t store itself.
Thanks for being here, and good luck!
— [Name], creator and first user of Mise & Match