Aggie Recs

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  Aggie Recs Home Page

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  Filtered Recipes

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  Community Posts

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  Pantry Resources

Inspiration

At UC Davis, the ASUCD Pantry plays a vital role in fighting food insecurity by providing students with free groceries and fresh produce, but access to food is only half the solution. Many students leave the Pantry with rice, beans, canned vegetables, pasta, and produce, but still ask “What can I actually make with this?” As busy students balancing classes, jobs, and organizations, we’ve all felt that frustration. We were inspired to build something that doesn’t just provide recipes, it empowers Aggies to confidently turn ingredients into complete, nourishing meals. Aggie Recs bridges the gap between food access and food preparation.

What it does

Aggie Recs is a simple, intuitive web application that allows students to input ingredients from their Pantry haul, instantly generates simple, healthy recipes using only those ingredients, and prioritizes affordable, beginner-friendly meals.

Students can:

Select ingredients by inputting what they got from the Pantry, filter by dietary needs (vegetarian, high-protein, etc.), view step-by-step cooking instructions, and see estimated cook time and difficulty level.

How we built it

We built Aggie Recs as a lightweight, scalable web application focused on speed and accessibility.

Frontend: --Responsive design for desktop and mobile --Clean UI for quick ingredient selection --Dynamic recipe rendering based on ingredient matching

Backend: --Ingredient-to-recipe matching algorithm --Partial match scoring system (so you still get suggestions even if you're missing 1–2 items) --Categorized recipe database based on the most common Pantry products

We prioritized simplicity and usability to ensure any student could take advantage of what we offer.

Challenges we ran into

We had to design a scoring system that would handle partial matches and suggest closest matches based on what they had.

We wanted advanced filtering features without cluttering the UI. But since we only had 24 hours, we decided to focus on core features like a simple matching engine, built upon the Pantry's stock of inventory first, and then expanded to additional features once we figured out our direction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing a system that aligns directly with the mission of the ASUCD Pantry, creating a UI simple enough for first-time cooks, engineering a flexible recipe-matching algorithm under hackathon time pressure, and delivering a solution that could realistically be adopted on campus. Additionally, our whole project and deck has been made according to the Pantry style guide, making sure to use their according hex colors and font style, which we believe makes it that much better. But at the end, what was best is that we made something for the Aggie community.

What we learned

Solving food insecurity requires both access and empowerment. Working under time pressure forces clear, prioritization. Building for a real community (UC Davis students) changes how you design, We also learned how much impact digital innovation can have when paired with an existing campus resource.

What's next for Aggie Recs

Direct integration with the ASUCD Pantry website (hopefully), weekly inventory syncing with live Pantry stock, AI-powered recipe personalization, QR code access inside the Pantry, analytics dashboard to help Pantry understand ingredient utilization. Long term, Aggie Recs could expand beyond UC Davis and support other UC campus pantries too!

Built With

• css
• javascript
• python
• react
• tailwind
• vite