Haus Chef

Recipes, meal planning, grocery lists, in your pocket. Everything you need to efficiently cook at home. Manage all of this while being able to easily import any recipe from websites and social media.

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Inspiration

I built this app because I had a similar problem to Eitan, where I needed a single place for my recipes, meal planning, and grocery list.

My family’s recipes were scattered between TikTok, YouTube, Google Sheets, and notes.

Our meal plan and grocery list were created by hand using a notepad or a notes app.

We always had to keep track of the meals we had recently and our ever-growing list of staples and new recipes.

We needed a unified app that could:

  1. Import recipes from any website or social media
  2. Convert them into structured data.
  3. Generate grocery lists automatically.
  4. Optimize weekly planning

The App

Frontend

Built with React Native + Expo, focusing on:

  • Cross-platform support (iOS + Android)
  • Fast iteration with Expo tooling
  • Clean, simple UI/UX

Core UI features:

  • Weekly meal planner
  • Recipes
  • Smart grocery list generation
  • Importing recipes from anywhere.

Backend

The backend runs on Cloudflare Workers using:

  • One worker for the API using Hono.
  • One worker for general web recipe importing.
  • One specialized worker for importing from social media.

Recipe Import Engine

This was a difficult part of the application to get right.

Essentially we:

  • Accept any URL for recipe websites or social media.
  • Filter out any content that is not related to the recipe.
  • Extract structured ingredients + steps.
  • Use AI where possible to clean up the data further.

Edge workers were used to isolate scraping workloads from the main API to prevent timeouts and improve reliability.

RevenueCat and monetization

It was simple to implement and set up RevenueCat, which will provide monetization for the advanced features of the application.

The critical functionality that can be monetized is the Recipe Import.

This functionality is a good candidate for monetization because it has a cost on the backend to run the Cloudflare Workers for the import.

Challenges

The main challenge was keeping the project scope small to complete the application in a short timeframe.

Building out the structure for the project was simple, but getting full user flows to feel very good to use was difficult.

A lot of time was taken in refining small interactions within the application, so the app was easy to use and provided the most value.

Closing Thoughts

I enjoyed building this application because it solved a problem that many other people deal with every day.

This hackathon was a fantastic catalyst to push me to fully build out an app that does all the features I need for this MVP.

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