NeuroNurish.app
Sensory-Friendly Cooking
Cooking platforms are built for people who enjoy cooking. NeuroNurish is built for people who need to eat but find the sensory experience of certain foods genuinely distressing — the textures, the smells, the visual presentation that most people don't even notice.
The gap in the market is enormous. Neurodivergent individuals, particularly autistic people with sensory processing differences, are chronically underserved by nutrition tooling. The challenge wasn't building AI-generated recipes — it was building the right inputs. You can't just add "no mushy textures" to a standard recipe prompt and call it done. We needed a proper sensory taxonomy.
Stack & Architecture
- AI recipe engine — prompted with sensory profile constraints, not just dietary ones
- Sensory taxonomy — custom classification of ingredients by texture, smell, temperature, and visual properties
- Adaptive UI — designed from the ground up for cognitive accessibility
- Cloudflare Workers — low-latency generation, no loading spinners
The Sensory Taxonomy
Ingredients have sensory properties that standard nutritional databases completely ignore. Texture (crunchy, mushy, stringy, gelatinous), temperature sensitivity during eating, smell intensity during cooking, visual properties that some people find aversive — all of it matters. We built a custom classification layer that tags ingredients across these dimensions, which gives the generation engine actual constraints to work with rather than vague instructions.
Accessibility by Default
The UI itself had to be right. Cluttered layouts, unexpected sounds, complex multi-step navigation — all of it creates friction for the people this is designed to help. NeuroNurish was designed with input from neurodivergent users from day one. Clean hierarchy, predictable interactions, no surprising motion, clear visual progression through recipes.
Beyond the Recipe
The end goal is a platform that can help with meal planning at a household level — including households with mixed sensory profiles. You might have one autistic child who can't handle mixed textures and another who has smell sensitivities. The platform needs to find the overlap, or clearly surface where it doesn't exist.
NeuroNurish is in active development with a small community of neurodivergent beta users who are shaping the sensory taxonomy. This is one of the projects I care most about — the potential to meaningfully improve the quality of life for people who are systematically ignored by mainstream food tech is real.
Want to build something like this?
Fractional CTO, technology advisory, or a build from scratch. Let's talk.