FoodChoice

Overview

FoodChoice (SAS NEW LIFE NOW) is a mobile app built around a simple conviction: eating well shouldn’t be a luxury. It lets French consumers compare grocery prices and product quality across 10 major retailers (Carrefour, Leclerc, Auchan, Intermarché, Lidl…) in real time, filter by what matters to them — price, Nutri-Score, origin, labels, composition — and find the cheapest nearby store for any product.

As a freelance developer, I designed and built the entire platform solo: the iOS/Android app, the backend and its data-ingestion pipeline, the payment and subscription flow, the infrastructure, and the marketing website.

The Product

• Geolocated search & category browse — results ranked by distance and price, with a “closest first” / “cheapest first” sort and a per-retailer grouped view
• Multi-criteria filters — Nutri-Score, NOVA, origin (France/EU), organic, gluten, palm oil, salt/sugar/fat thresholds and more, split into free and premium tiers
• Product comparison — one tap shows every (store, price) pair carrying a product across all retailers
• Lists & favorites — local-first for anonymous users, server-synced with offline queue and merge-on-sign-in for accounts
• Freemium model — 7 searches per day free, unlimited at €3.49/month

Architecture & Technical Work

A pnpm monorepo with two apps:

• Mobile (Expo 53 / React Native 0.79, Expo Router) — geolocated UX with Mapbox, feature-flagged search quota (PostHog), anonymous in-app purchases via RevenueCat verified server-side against Apple-signed receipts
• Backend (NestJS 11, TypeORM, PostgreSQL + PostGIS, BullMQ) — geospatial search and ranking, plus a scheduled ingestion pipeline merging retail price observations (Stratalis) with food reference data (OpenFoodFacts) into a canonical catalogue; an append-only observation archive keeps the live database lean

Around the code: Docker-based deployment via Coolify, Grafana + Prometheus monitoring, automated Postgres backups to Backblaze B2, and 19 architecture decision records documenting the design choices.

Shipping to the App Store

Getting a freemium, anonymous-purchase app approved meant working through Apple’s guidelines directly: account creation is an opt-in upsell (never a purchase precondition), location purpose strings state the ranking use case explicitly, and a review rejection was analysed and resolved with a documented remediation. The app is live on the App Store and Play Store.

The Website

I also built the marketing site (foodchoice.fr): a static bilingual Astro site — landing, mission, FAQ, download and legal pages — with SEO/GEO work so it surfaces well in both search engines and AI answers.