DormChef

Land on DormChef and see exactly what it does — no signup needed to get started.
Pick your cuisines, set a budget, and exclude allergens in one simple form.
Your full week, one tap away — switch days and see breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Tap any meal to see full ingredients and step-by-step cooking instructions.

Inspiration:

Every student knows the feeling. You've got hours of classes, maybe a part-time job, and by the time you get back to your dorm, you're exhausted. The last thing you want to do is figure out what to cook. Most students end up eating the same three meals over and over, or just skipping cooking altogether. We wanted to fix that by taking the thinking out of it completely.

What it does:

DormChef builds you a personalized weekly meal plan in seconds. You just enter your budget, pick the cuisines you like, and tell it what to avoid (allergies, dislikes, whatever). It gives you back a full week of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with ingredients and step-by-step instructions for every meal. If you find a meal you really like, you can save it to your favorites with one tap, so it's easy to find again later instead of losing track of it. No more staring at your fridge wondering what to make.

How we built it

We split the work based on what each of us was good at. The frontend was built with Flask templates and plain HTML/CSS, all sharing one stylesheet so every screen looks consistent. The backend uses Python and SQLAlchemy to store and filter recipes based on what the user picks. To speed things up, we used Python's ThreadPoolExecutor to generate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time instead of one after another, which cut down how long it takes to build a full plan.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge hit about 1.5 hours before we needed to launch. We couldn't get the app to actually deploy. We ran into Python version mismatches, missing dependencies, and issues getting the production server set up right. We had to figure out the right hosting platform, fix our dependency setup, and keep trying different fixes until it finally worked. We also ran into a performance problem with our AI recipe search. It was way too slow, taking too long to generate results, which would have made the app feel broken for anyone actually using it. We had to speed it up so the meal plan generation felt fast instead of making people wait around. It wasn't smooth, but between the deployment issues and the speed problem, we learned a lot about what it actually takes to get an app live and working well, not just running slowly on our own laptops.

Accomplishments

We're proud that DormChef isn't just a working prototype sitting on someone's computer. It's a real app, live on the internet, that students could actually open and use today. On top of that, we made it fast by generating meals concurrently instead of one at a time, so the whole plan comes together quickly instead of making the user wait around.

What we learned

We learned that building the app is only half the work. Getting it deployed and actually working for real users is its own challenge, with its own bugs and surprises. We also learned how to work better as a team under pressure, checking in with each other often so nobody was stuck on a problem alone.

What's next for DormChef

We'd like to add real photos for every recipe instead of a photo based on cuisine type, and build out an auto-generated grocery list based on the week's plan so students can shop without writing anything down themselves. Longer term, we want DormChef to get smarter over time, learning what a student actually enjoys based on which meals they favorite most, so the weekly plan feels more personalized the longer they use it.

Our Video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16wm6Hns0DZ5RnBXCT6I4cZvvIvtkE2r8