Taste the city is a web app platform for folks to book curated food tours.

Taste the city

Taste the City is a new small business supported by a booking app for users to browse and reserve curated tastings in various cities such as Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and New York. This product was designed and built as a new platform to launch the owner’s business.

My role: UX/UI designer, project manager, product manager at Pixeltree Inc.
I worked on the Pixeltree team where I collaborated with the client and development team to define, design, and develop the web app. I continue working with the client to this day designing and delivering new features and adjustments.

Outcomes
MVP launched in mid 2023. New features and refinements have been added with more on the way.

Over $100K revenue made in the first year.

Taste the City won the Queen’s Entrepreneurship Competition in 2024.

Taste the City owner made a pitch on Dragon’s Den in May 2025 and may air in fall 2025. Keep an eye out!

Launch version of the listings page

This is the original listing page that’s been publicly available since mid 2023. As of January 2025 I am updating the UI to refine the brand identity and add a new feature the client has requested. The clientele has been an older crowd with more money so we’re looking to update the UI to reflect a more elegant, refined vibe, like a fine-dining experience.

Food Affair is another new addition coming soon that offers exclusive tastings where users need to input a password to enter the booking details page to make a reservation. These changes can be seen below.

Tasting Details page

The Tasting detail page displays a description, image gallery, tasting details like locations and duration and reservation booking. Dietary restrictions are communicated to the restaurant to ensure participants get the correct type of dish.

As soon as a booking is made, the user is emailed and texted a confirmation.

Taste the City uses a series of scheduled texts to guide tasters from location to location. Tasters get a reminder 24 hours in advance. Then a heads up 1 hour in advance. The remainder of the texts are based on the number of locations, walking time, and duration of each location. This info is entered by the admin in the back end (pictures of this below!).

Restaurant dashboard

As soon as bookings are made, the reservation time for each location is calculated and updated on the restaurant’s front end. Each reservation includes the time, name, size of party, and dietary restrictions. When tasters arrive the restaurant verifies a 4-digit automatically generated code (sent to the taster via text) and checks them in.

Turns out restaurants don’t even use this feature! A feature we will be adding this year is automated emails. Once reservations are booked, the system will automatically send an email notification to the participating restaurants and they will input it into their system.

Admin panel | Tastings table

Not only do I need to make intuitive UIs for visitors to browse and booking tastings, I also need to organize a system for the admin to create tastings in the backend. Here is where Taste the City staff can create all the data points needed to make a tasting. There are libraries of cities, neighborhoods, and restaurants that can be used to create a tasting. The admin can also set schedules and intervals between stops. These schedules are also used to trigger automated texts that guide customers throughout tastings since there isn’t a dedicated host.

Admin panel | Create new tasting

This is the page where admin will create a new tasting. Once the base tasting is made (Name, neighbourhood, # of eats, cost, description, and images) then dates, times, and restaurant intervals can be created.

Admin panel | Compose tastings

Once a base tasting is create, the admin will add stops, which are restaurants that have been added to the system. Duration and travel time minutes are set here which calculates the reservation times for the participating restaurants. The admin also creates tasting times that can be booked on the front end.

Tasting texts

A core feature of Taste the City is the guided texts sent to the tasters and includes:

  • Thank you for booking with booking code

  • 24 hour reminder text

  • 30 minute reminder

  • Descriptive text per restaurant with map - scheduled based on time per restaurant

  • We hope you enjoyed your Tasting! with survey

Walkess tastings are similar except that there is no map per stop since the tasting takes place at a single location. Texts also describe each “stop” as a “dish” to recontextualize the term.