Make it Vegan

Make it Vegan is a chrome extension that checks whether a recipe is Vegan and give adaptation recommendations for Non-vegan recipes.

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Inspiration

Finding vegan recipes online is surprisingly challenging. Even when you discover a recipe you love, you're left wondering: "Is this already vegan? Could I adapt it with simple substitutions?" Manually checking every ingredient and researching alternatives is time-consuming and frustrating. We realized that AI excels at understanding contextual recipe data and making intelligent judgments about ingredients and substitutions—so we built Make it Vegan to solve this problem.

What it does

Make it Vegan is a Chrome extension that transforms any online recipe into a vegan-friendly version in seconds:

  1. Smart Recipe Extraction - Automatically parses recipe information (title, ingredients, instructions, cook time, servings, and cover image) from any recipe website into a clean, structured format displayed in the sidebar
  2. Vegan Analysis - Uses Chrome's built-in AI to analyze each ingredient and determine if the recipe is already vegan or can be adapted
  3. Intelligent Substitutions - Provides practical vegan alternatives for non-vegan ingredients.

The extension works across most popular recipe sites, requiring just one click to get instant results.

How we built it

We built Make it Vegan using Chrome's native AI capabilities:

  • Chrome Extension Architecture - Content scripts, sidebar UI, and popup interface
  • Recipe Parsing Engine - Custom JavaScript functions that extract recipe data from various website formats
  • Chrome Built-in AI Integration - Leverages the Prompt API for on-device recipe analysis

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was working within the constraints of Chrome's built-in AI model. As a smaller, on-device model, it has limited token capacity, which meant we had to:

  • Optimize our system prompts to be extremely concise yet effective
  • Balance between providing enough context for accurate analysis and staying under the token ceiling
  • Iterate on prompt engineering to maximize output quality with minimal input

Additionally, handling the diverse HTML structures across different recipe websites required building robust parsing functions with multiple fallback strategies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Wide Compatibility - The extension works reliably across most popular recipe websites
  • Practical Results - The AI-generated substitutions are genuinely useful, with realistic alternatives
  • Instant Results - Fast, real-time analysis that makes recipe adaptation effortless
  • Clean UX - Intuitive sidebar interface that feels natural and non-intrusive

What we learned

  • How to build production-ready AI tools from scratch, including prompt engineering, error handling, and user experience design
  • The importance of working within AI model constraints rather than against them—using smaller models strategically for specific tasks
  • Effective web scraping techniques for handling inconsistent HTML structures across thousands of websites

What's next for Make it Vegan

We're excited to expand Make it Vegan's capabilities:

  • Multiple Dietary Restrictions - Extend support to gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, and other common allergies
  • Personalized Profiles - Let users save their specific dietary needs and preferences for instant, customized recipe adaptations
  • Shopping List Generation - Automatically create shopping lists with vegan substitutions ready to go
  • Serving Adjustments - Smart scaling of ingredient quantities for different serving sizes
  • Recipe Saving - Bookmark and organize adapted recipes for future reference
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