Inspiration
Food insecurity and grocery inflation affect millions of families, yet most meal planning apps ignore budget constraints entirely. We wanted to build something that makes healthy eating accessible — not just aspirational.
What it does
BiteBudget generates personalized AI-powered 7-day meal plans based on your family size, dietary restrictions, fitness goals, and weekly grocery budget. It finds real grocery stores near your zip code, ranks them by nutrition score, and compares live prices so you always know where to shop and what to buy. A built-in shopping list, food map, and personal goals tracker round out the experience.
How we built it
React frontend with Tailwind CSS, Node/Express backend, and the Groq API (Llama 3.1) for AI meal generation. Google Maps and Places APIs power the store locator and address autocomplete. USDA FoodData Central handles nutritional data. Everything is tied together with a real-time proxy architecture so the frontend and backend stay in sync.
Challenges we ran into
Getting the AI to return consistent, structured JSON for 7-day meal plans across wildly different dietary combinations was harder than expected. Filtering Google Places results to only return genuine grocery stores — blocking hospitals, car dealerships, and convenience stores — required multiple layers of keyword and type-level filtering. Managing shared location state across five tabs cleanly was also a non-trivial UX problem.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A fully working AI meal planner that respects real budget constraints, live store price comparison using actual nearby locations, and a shopping list that only shows prices for known grocery items rather than fabricating numbers for custom entries.
What we learned
LLM outputs need strict schema enforcement and fallback logic — you can't trust a model to return perfect JSON every time. We also learned how much UX polish matters: small things like clearing a zero when you click a number field, or showing a dropdown autocomplete, meaningfully change how the app feels to use.
What's next for BiteBudget
Integrating real-time grocery store pricing via retailer APIs, adding a barcode scanner for the shopping list, expanding to support SNAP/EBT benefit tracking, and building a mobile app version. Long term, we want BiteBudget to serve food banks and community organizations as a free meal planning resource.
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