Plately

Inspiration

As students, we struggle with meal planning on tight budgets. We created Plately to reduce food waste and help students eat better affordably.

What it does

Plately turns available ingredients into recipe suggestions. Users enter what they have, and the app searches thousands of recipes, showing what ingredients they own versus what they need to buy.

How we built it

We built a client-server architecture: the frontend collects user inputs and sends them to our Node.js backend, which communicates with the Spoonacular API to fetch and format recipe results.

Challenges we ran into

Structuring API requests and handling rate limits
Parsing and organizing ingredient data from API responses
Designing an intuitive UI without overwhelming users
Handling failed API calls and empty results gracefully

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully integrated Spoonacular API with proper authentication
Built our first complete full-stack application
Implemented collapsible advanced filtering for nutritional control
Addressed real student needs: budget, food waste, and healthy eating
Created an intuitive, functional interface under time constraints
Applied security best practices with environment variables

What we learned

We mastered API integration, asynchronous JavaScript, and full-stack development. We gained hands-on experience with Express.js, CORS handling, and secure environment variable management.