Mezze
The cookbook your feed already wrote.
Food content has never been easier to save, or harder to use. Recipes pile up in TikTok likes and Instagram saves, and almost none of them make it to the stove. Mezze, built by mobile app studio IRL Apps, pulls every recipe you have liked or saved into one personal cookbook, ready to filter, plan and shop.
Brand Appart partnered with IRL Apps to build the brand from scratch and design the product around it: brand strategy, brand identity, a mascot and illustration system, iOS product design and the launch campaign. The brief was simple to say and hard to land: make a technical shortcut feel like an invitation to cook.
The challenge
Make automation feel warm
The product's edge is technical: it syncs your likes on its own. Cooking, though, is a human and shared moment, and the brand could never read like a utility.
Win the scroll first
Acquisition starts on TikTok, through creators and native content. The identity had to be loud enough to stop a thumb and simple enough to hold on a phone screen.
Credible from day one
A brand-new subscription app, with no users, no reviews and no history to lean on. It had to look established before anyone opened it.
Brand Strategy
A pantry staple, not a food trend.
The direction was set in the kickoff workshop: look back, not sideways. Instead of today's sun-bleached Mediterranean aesthetic, the brand borrows from the timeless packaging of harissa tins and sardine cans, objects that have sat in kitchens for decades without ever going out of style.
The positioning follows the same logic. Mezze is not one more recipe app competing for attention. It is the place where everything you already saved finally gets cooked, with a voice to match: a confident chef, warm and direct, who never overdoes it.
Brand Identity
Packaging energy, product discipline.
The wordmark is set in a heavy display face with a printed drop shadow, stamped like a label on a tin. Bold stripes, a warm palette of red, orange and yellow cut with an intense blue, and a sardine in a chef's hat give the brand a cast and a face, not just a logo.
Around it we built a full illustration family, from ingredients and utensils to the mascot, all drawn from a single anchor image so every new piece stays on-brand. The same system carries the app icon, the App Store page, story stickers and campaign visuals.
Deliverable
From the icon to the feed.
We designed the iOS product end to end: onboarding, home, cookbook, meal planner, grocery lists, a step-by-step cooking mode and paywalls, all assembled from one design system so new features ship without redrawing the brand. On top of it: App Store screenshots, motion design, home screen widgets and share-to-story stickers that turn a finished dish into content.
For launch, the identity moves into the feed with campaign and social visuals built for TikTok, where Mezze's audience already spends its evenings.
Result
From saved to served.
Mezze enters the App Store with a brand that feels like it has always lived in the kitchen: generous, recognisable, impossible to mistake for its competitors. Mezze doesn't ask you to find new recipes. It gets you cooking the ones you already loved.
The work did not stop at launch. IRL Apps kept Brand Appart on board through On Demand to keep shipping the product, from AI-assisted recipe edits to creator pages and new illustration batches.
