about.

We care about you, your health, your budget, your time with your family, and world peace, too. Seriously.

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We created Mealvana because we’ve been there ourselves: agonizing over choices (or lack thereof), laboriously collecting recipes and making lists, having a difficult time sticking to a diet or restrictions, and not knowing how healthy we are feeding our families.

Mealvana is made by a small group of foodies who happen to be also data-nerds; engineers who are obsessed with design; and chefs who are not only interested in good food, but also healthy, fresh, sustainable food. We are just like you - we want tasty, diverse, and healthy dinners, with little time spent planning, and more time spent celebrating and enjoying food with our loved ones.

We are proud of what we make. We are our own biggest users and fans. We interviewed hundreds of people who are like you and poured our love into making this app. We perfected the app frame by frame, and pixel by pixel. We are on a mission to change the world one meal at a time. After all, food impacts our health, our time with family, and the way we eat – more fresh, local, less waste, all contribute to a bright, sustainable future.

Team.

Xuan Huang

Co-founder

Statistician by training, engineer at heart. Optimist. Huge Alton Brown fan. Passionate about making beautiful, functional data products. Currently obsessed with everything fermented from kimchi to sourdough to really good beer, and creating the world-class compost bin (which, come to think about it, is fermentation as well).

Alex Zotov

Co-founder

Alex is a software engineer and full stack developer, and until recently was working on processing medical data at the UAB Informatics Institute. His responsibilities at Mealvana is washing dishes and web/app design and development. He still hopes the AI applications he develops do not surpass his own intelligence.

Lee Martin

Co-founder

Full-stack engineer and triathlete. Armed with his keyboard and a cup of coffee that fuels his creativity (and keeps his caffeine levels optimal), Lee's attention to detail is so meticulous that we suspect he uses magnifier to look at Figma designs, pixel by pixel. When he's not crafting seamless user experiences, Lee can be found training for triathlons, because, hey, debugging complex algorithms is just a warm-up for him. As a full-stack aficionado, Lee has the uncanny ability to juggle front-end wizardry with back-end sorcery, leaving his colleagues in awe of his technical prowess. With a dash of humor injected into his code comments, Lee ensures that his software not only runs smoothly but also keeps developers chuckling. Just remember, if you spot a rogue semicolon, you can blame it on him. (Comments from Lee: I dunno chatgpt wrote this for me lol)

Haibin Zhuang

Product & Engineering

Haibin is a full-stack engineer, an entrepreneur, and a veteran in Gaming apps. If you found a typo in our app and "snack" misspelled as "snake", it is probably Haibin's fault. In all sincerity, we will have Haibin to thank for when we reach millions of users (soon) and our server still runs like butter.

JR Jacobson

Chef & Content Creator

The real hero. Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence our engineering team is trying to create, JR screens and puts the AI generated recipes to test. (Of course we love him also because he feeds leftover to the rest of the team.)