Chef AI

We want to create a program users can utilize by using AI to create meals based off items in their pantry

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🌱 Inspiration

We love the finer things in life, much like delicious food. In spite of that, food waste is a critical factor in climate change, significantly contributing to greenhouse gas emissions that affect our ecosystem. With that in mind, our profound love for food and an unwavering commitment to addressing global issues, we've crafted a project that aligns with both our passions and the planet's needs.

“The fight against food waste begins in the home.” – Paul Polman.

This perspective aligns perfectly with our belief in the power of individual actions to drive collective change. By integrating technology into our daily routines, we have a tremendous opportunity to promote sustainability right from our kitchens.

🥦 What it Does

Our project is a website which users can create profiles and interact with their virtual pantries where they can input the particular foods/produce that they have in their household. The website will help visually show the user how soon their produce will expire and be able to communicate with ChatGPT for applicable recipes to the food that will expire the soonest and reduce the amount of possible food we have to throw without even realizing it.

🌿 How We Built It

Our application's backend is mainly built using Flask, Python while our database stores user and pantry information using SQLite. Our front-end was built mainly using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We also made use of OpenAI's API to handle our AI-generated recipes.

🌵 Challenges We Ran Into

We faced many challenges during the process of our project, but the two problems we believe we had the most trouble with were the following:

  • A challenge we ran into while making our project was limited by our experience and created issues for us, especially for time management as we spent a lot of time doing the necessary research we needed to do in the making of our website.
  • Another challenge we faced while connecting the front and back-end code was the usual formatting issues, buttons not reacting the way they should, however our biggest challenge was connecting the API to our application. Figuring out the correct syntax and implementation methods was especially troublesome as we are new to these technologies.

🍀 Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

We are really happy with our UI design and our detailed planning that allowed us to smoothly integrate and solve problems as they arose.

We are also really proud of the amount of languages and implementations we learned on the way, we engaged and loved the experience during the making of this application that required us to work quickly and be on our toes!

💚 What We Learned

Similar to our accomplishments, we learned and applied new languages such as HTML, Flask, and generally most of the back-end development.

We learned that teamwork and time management plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of our work and most importantly the amount of work a team can do in 24 hours!

🌳 What’s Next for Chef AI

A better integration of the uniqueness of every individual that allows users to be more specific about their dietary restrictions, allergies, and food preferences.

In the future, enhancing the AI capabilities by introducing additional features, such as the creation of a virtual spice rack. As well as incorporating non-perishable items into the user's virtual kitchen to generate more recipes aimed towards our goal of zero waste.

We would also love to bring our website to mobile devices that allows kitchen management on the go as well as integrate our product with supermarkets around your area to in order to have the option to purchase suggested ingredients for a wider variety of yummy recipes.

Currently we are utilizing GPT 3.5 for our recipe generation. However, we would love to be able to integrate GPT 4 for better accuracy, and especially now that it can take advantage of DALL-E 3, we would love to take advantage of that technology to create photos of the recipes it creates.

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