CHEF SUE™

The SUE Device
App Icon

Inspiration

I'm a tinkerer and product Manager and thought of what would help us stand out from a sea of mobile apps, while still solving one of the main points, which is managing the food that you have in your household inventory.

My buddy Jeremy and I caught on to the hackathon late but decided to give it a go!

What it does

CHEF SUE and the SUE scanner is an app and device combo that gives users grocery superpowers in managing their Inventory Stock List as well as their Shopping List by allowing them to scan items that are running low or that they are about to throw away. We then take these items and add them to their shopping list so that they never come home and say "Damn, I forgot the……"

For the App we are also allowing users to upload or take pics of recipes found online or in cookbooks so that we can help parse the recipe, ingredients, and cooking instructions for them. While also being able to help them with AI-suggested recipes from "SUE" based on what they have in Stock or specific ingredients they have. Additionally, we allow users to drag and drop recipes to specific calendar dates so users can plan their meals!

How we built it

For the CHEF SUE app, we built this using React Native, Expo, and InsForge as the main stack, along with other resources like NativeWind for styling, Zustand for state management, and React Native Reanimated for animations. In regard to the AI models we are using, we're using a combination of GPT 4o Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash

For the SUE device, we went ahead and created a arduino microcontroller (Raspberry PI) that has a camera, battery, LEDs, a button, housed in a 3D enclosure. We have now filed our patent as well!

Challenges we ran into

Too many to name, but mainly that we found out about this competition late so we were up against the wall

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a working prototype of the Sue Device built, as well as the app working with RevenueCat integrated

What we learned

That we are at the forefront of product development, where we effectively can build anything, so why not differentiate further and build hardware that also helps solve the problem of inventory management in the house!

What's next for CHEF SUE™

We've got our patent filed and are now looking to partner with an influencer. We would love to speak with Eitan. Additionally, we see that our device is special in that it can help all recipe apps, so we look to establish partnerships with other recipe app makers. We also have some pretty cool service-related features, etc., in the pipeline, so we're excited for what we can do with the app itself as well!