Meal generator

Make something useful out of your leftovers. Who likes wasting?

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Inspiration

Have you ever had leftover ingredients and not sure what to do with them? I don't like wasting (I hope you don't either), so I made this app to provide a sustainable alternative to letting your food go to waste. Another motivation for this project was how I'd be eating the same meals over and over again--I only know so many recipes. With this app, I can expand my cooking knowledge and make more unique food in the future.

What it does

You input your available ingredients, and the generator (via AI or someone else's recipe on the internet) returns the required ingredients (same as what you inputted) and instructions to get it done!

How we built it

This app is built on Next.js, which is built on React.js, and was deployed on Vercel. The AI inference was done through GROQ which is free of charge for their starting tier, as well as the Spoonacular API which is also free to start with.

Challenges we ran into

Mostly formatting issues from the AI response, since sometimes it likes to get creative and format the response data in different ways. Having to account for all these variations means that the application isn't perfect but still displays the data as best as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the app done! This has been one of my ideas for a while and I've finally gotten the chance to make it a reality.

What we learned

Third party component libraries like shadcn/ui

What's next for Meal generator

Definitely UI updates and API optimizations. Also, instead of separating the generated response as AI or regular API, combine the two so that the AI relies on the API to generate even more personalized meals.

There could also be a feature where the user provides the desired nutrition facts for their recipe (such as grams of protein or calories), and a recipe is generated based on those values.

Built With

  • groq
  • next.js
  • spoonacular-api
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