Fridge: Meal Planner and Recipes

Discover new recipes
Meal plans with curated shopping lists
Plan your week

Inspiration

It's funny actually - a few months ago my girlfriend had the problem that she finds heaps of recipes on Instagram and Tiktok but doesn't have any way to actually make them useful, they're stuck as screenshots that don't get looked at or deep down in her saved videos on other platforms and they never get looked at again.

As soon as I saw this hackathon I knew I needed to build something that we could use to solve this issue and make meal planning and recipe discovery a breeze.

What it does

Fridge is a swipe based recipe discovery app that turns saved chaos into structured meals.

Import recipes from screenshots, cookbooks or URLs. Swipe what you like. Build a meal plan. Generate a smart shopping list.

It takes scattered content and turns it into something you can actually cook.

How we built it

Fridge is built with React Native and a modern serverless backend.

AI powered OCR extracts recipe data from screenshots, cookbook photos and URLs. That unstructured mess gets parsed into structured ingredients, quantities and instructions.

Every recipe is stored in a normalized format. That means swiping, saving, meal planning and shopping list generation all work off clean data instead of guesswork.

A huge focus was ingredient normalization. Recipes say things like “1 cup cheese” or “1 can tomatoes”. The system parses quantities properly, maps them to a normalized ingredient database and attaches macro nutrition data so meal plans are not just convenient but measurable.

The goal was simple. Shopping lists should reflect real world buying behaviour, not vague recipe text.

Challenges we ran into

Ingredient normalization was easily the hardest technical problem. Human cooking language is messy. Translating that into structured quantities and mapping it to a clean food database with accurate macro data is not trivial.

It required balancing flexibility with precision. The system allows user corrections to improve matching over time, but baseline resolution is still an area I want to push much further.

On the product side, this was my first React Native build. Mobile is different. Gesture systems, micro interactions, tactile feedback. It forced a complete rethink compared to web.

Shipping through TestFlight and navigating the App Store pipeline was another big milestone. Seeing something go from local build to installable app changes how you think about building products.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest technical win is the recipe scanning system.

Cookbook photos and screenshots turn into structured recipes with ingredients, quantities and instructions in seconds.

Messy images become clean, actionable meal plans.

But the bigger win is this. Fridge is not a demo. It is already being used in my own kitchen. It solves a real problem that existed before the hackathon and it will continue being used after it.

What we learned

Building Fridge forced a shift away from web first thinking. Mobile performance, gestures and polish matter at a different level.

Integrating RevenueCat and shipping builds through Expo and the App Store gave me full exposure to the mobile subscription and distribution stack. From idea to live build, the entire pipeline is now something I understand end to end.

Fridge was not just a feature build. It was a crash course in shipping real mobile software.

What's next for Fridge: Meal Planner and Recipes

The MVP proves the core idea. Chaos can be structured.

Next, Fridge becomes more than a discovery tool. It becomes a personal food intelligence layer.

AI Meal Planning Assistant Chat with Fridge. “I want 2,000 calories per day.” “I want more protein.” “My budget is £50 this week.”

Fridge generates a structured plan that respects nutrition targets, budget constraints and personal taste. Over time it adapts based on what actually gets cooked.

Real Time Grocery Integration Pull in supermarket pricing and availability. Calculate the true cost of a meal plan before it is committed to. Move from meal plan to grocery order in a single flow.

Inspiration to planning to checkout. No gaps.

Social to Structured Pipeline Share an Instagram or TikTok recipe directly into Fridge. The app extracts ingredients, normalizes quantities and makes it instantly usable.

That closes the loop between scrolling and cooking.

Long term, Fridge can become a personal operating system for food. Learning from what gets saved, cooked and enjoyed. Optimizing meals around health, budget and taste automatically.

Food is a recurring weekly decision for everyone. Right now it is reactive and messy.

Fridge makes it structured, measurable and intentional.

That is just the beginning.