Why build a way to approach whole food nutrition that turns meal prep into a modular, visual matching game.
If more people know how to incorporate fresh, local vegetables into their meals there will be more support for essential food infrastructure like farms and so on.
Rather than an explanation of the system (that’s here) this page will explain how the idea came to be and the journey to this point in its evolution
Origins of PREPBLOX
The very first time I made a visual map of my meal prep situation, I had a 6 day work trip coming up and a crisper full of vegetables.
With a few coloured pens and a fairly general understanding of how food works from my time in restaurants, I did a little doodle to map out my meal plan
Deceptively simple, this visual blueprint helped me understand how each of the vegetables I had would show up in the meals throughout my busy week ahead
I set about preparing vegetables in the way I’d mapped out ahead of time and grouped them in containers according to the eventual way I would use them
I’ll happily report that I was able to achieve fridge zero before my travels, plus spent a lot less time prepping and cleaning than I typically would have.
Huh. Maybe there was something here
As a visual, non-linear thinker I would often struggle with staying on track and this seemed to offer a solution to that by giving me a structure that’s flexible
I spent the return journey tinkering with a cleaner, digital version of the concept so that when I landed I could attempt to replicate my earlier success with it
The next few weeks rushed by in a flurry of peeling, trimming and chopping as I put the early version of PREPBLOX into practice
With all the bounty of the season here in beautiful BC, there was no end to all the vegetables I was able to take on and it gave me so much inspiration to cook
I chopped, diced and sliced my way into all sorts of delicious dishes determined by whatever was in season
There were no visuals on containers, no ingredicons to speak of. Just a rough version of the idea mapped out in excel (or google sheets, probably) because I figured losing the paper was inevitable
I will forever be grateful to a very smart friend of mine who went into those first few pilot recipes to give me some much needed feedback.
Lisa discovered all of the gaps in my explanation that seemed intuitive to me (but clearly weren’t) and I set to work attempting to bridge them.
Over the span of about 6 months, I tirelessly tinkered away on this system that I believed could help people make a more fun meal prep experience at home with ongoing testing and more feedback
I saw my own food waste shrinking with each weekly meal rotation, able to hit fridge zero time and time again, but I fell flat when trying to explain how other people could apply this concept to their own life for improved nutritional outcomes
From the cutting board to the drawing board
For a loooong time, I was obsessed with making a PREPBLOX card game. Each stage, step and concept broken down into a small hand-cut-and-laminated IRL physical card into the early morning.
At one point, 64 individual cards were presented along with little bags of herb and spice blends as the “starter kit”. No real instructions nor orientation guide in sight, but a lot of disorganized info.
This “final” beta version went out to 2 dozen people who had agreed to give it a go and offer feedback – but 90% of the group who received one had 0 clue how to even approach what was included.
To this day, what happened in that first round of external testing is the most valuable failure in PREPBLOX’s story. A humbling realization that I was making things more complicated than needed.
It later became clear that the card game was the vehicle I needed to explore how a modular meal system might work IRL – like a mechanical reference point
While I spent many hours designing, cutting and laminating physical cards, the bulk of my free time during this era was spent experimenting with playing around in a block-based WordPress plugin called Elementor.
This allowed me to digitize the parts of the card game in a way that I could explore ongoing. Quick substitution of assets and functions once something proved in need of revision.
For a time, things existed across the physical prepblox cards and online via recipes accessed by QR codes on cards – this is
Again, feedback would reveal that this was a clunky experience and made it more challenging to understand the concept
You can see from the left image above, the version of prepblox.com I built at that time was designed to feel like you were immersed in this visual world of modular meal prep. That’s Alton – don’t ask…
Website UX/UI best practices be damned, I had vision in my head and very limited technical expertise at my disposal to help communicate it out to the world.
It’s no wonder, looking back, that people had a hard time understanding what I was trying to achieve with PREPBLOX and how it could ever help them eat better
Something that sticks
If I’m honest, it took a ridiculously long time for me to realize that the best way to share PREPBLOX with the world was to use vinyl stickers of the ingredicons
The advantages were really obvious:
- Not digital – analog, offline, tactile
- Low cost + easily distributed
- Adaptable to existing containers
- Easily expanded upon + replaced
Prep day suddenly went on autopilot, the labelling of the containers made it easy to stay organized while binge watching some TV show or other in the background.
With my recipe-ready elements marked in a way that highlights their function, I had a much easier time coming up with a recipe game plan
If something I had planned to use was no longer where I’d left it, the ingredient icons in my fridge and pantry highlight a way to substitute or exchange them out
Version 1 of the stickers from 2022 (above) focused on the stage at which prep is added into a recipe. These color coded “instructicons” were meant to sequence the introduction of your prep.
The later version (below) went back to the roots of that earliest iteration of a vegetable prepared into simple shapes.
Late 2023 thru late 2025 things slowed to a halt, as life did what life tends to do. I’d just begun to find some momentum with how things operated
Between a large project at work and other strains on my personal bandwidth, the next few years required I step away from building the idea of PREPBLOX.
While this sucked, for a time, it also gave me an opportunity to put my system to an actual, rigorous test in the real world.
As a person who lets self-care lapse first during stressful times, if I could build a system that worked for my own successes I would be on the right track
I kept a few stickers on my containers and in my pantry as a little reminder to myself, and started to observe my behaviours
What did I reach for when my energy level was low and there seemed to be no time in the day? That’s what would help people
The ebbs and flows of life through this time were underscored by many hearty meals packed with colourful vegetables.
Delightful exploration of the various other local products on offer here in the Okanagan valley and the best of each season.
Endless experimentation with techniques and flavour combinations, fueled by the deeper
Back to the BASICS
The real essence of PREPBLOX
On my return to the project in late 2025, I assessed what I had been building and with little hesitation began peeling away
What was necessary and essential? If something were removed, would any person but its creator (me) even know?
Coming back to PREPBLOX with fresh eyes allowed me to see more clearly where I had myself overcomplicated it.
Maybe overcomplicated was the wrong word – I was oversharing too much of the whole vision right out of the gate. Giddily.
If I wanted to bring other people along on my journey into the wonderful world of iconic cooking, I needed to start off with some super accessible BASICS
Single dish cooking that uses at most 3 additional ingredients seems like a good sandbox for us to play in at the beginning
Combined with instructions on how each of this season’s vegetables can be turned into recipe-ready PREPBLOX
Why on a Sheet Pan?
By the time I knew my scope, the crisp air and abundant root vegetables of the winter had made their presence known
This made Prepblox on a Sheet Pan the clear first choice for exploration since this particular preparation method is so well suited to winter cooking.
1 of 3 eventual releases that will each focus on a different method while being true to the single-dish, minimal pantry approach that’s central to BASICS
What’s coming next?
Prepblox in a Sauté Pan will deal with lighter vegetables and use techniques like steaming + gentle sautéing to elevate them. Expected to release in Spring 2026
Square meals will come together in the same pan using pre-cooked pasta noodles or grains.