A lunch planner built by a parent, for parents

Hi, I'm Yong Jae Lee.

I'm a Senior Product Designer based in Auckland. Every morning I'd find myself standing in front of the fridge, wondering what to pack in my child's lunchbox — and every weekend I'd stress about what groceries to buy for the week ahead.

I wanted to make proper, balanced lunches using ingredients actually available at Woolworths and Pak'nSave — without spending 20 minutes each night planning. So I built Kiwi Lunchbox: a free tool that generates a week of school lunches in seconds, complete with shopping lists and price estimates.

I'm based in East Auckland and do most of our family shopping at Pak'nSave, split fairly evenly between the Ormiston and Botany stores, with the odd top-up at Woolworths Meadowlands or the Tai Ping Asian grocer. Being a Korean family, the rice and nori for my daughter's onigiri come from the Korean grocer and the furikake from the Japanese one — so the prices and examples across this site come from the shops I actually push a trolley around, not numbers scraped off a website.

This is a solo project. There's no team, no investors, no sponsored content. Just a parent building something useful.

🔖 What's a bit different here: each week I check the Woolworths and New World mailers and tag the items that are actually on sale. When you toggle "Use this week's sales" in the planner sidebar, the generated lunches lean on those discounted ingredients first — so the weekly shop ends up cheaper without you having to compare three flyers yourself.