FreshFork - Personal AI Meal Planner

Login to access your personalized dashboard—explore tailored meal plans, recipes, and flexible options for your dietary goals.
Explore taste, diet goals, allergies, equipment, and cuisines for a personalized meal-planning experience.
Your personalized meal planner and home dashboard—discover custom recipes, and flexible meal options tailored to your preferences and goals.
Generate personalized meals based on your available ingredients—effortlessly create meals that match your preferences and dietary goals.

Inspiration

As a team, we all shared a common frustration: deciding what to eat every day and figuring out what groceries to buy. After experimenting with platforms like HelloFresh and Factor, we found the experience lacking—meals were pre-determined with little flexibility, and unused groceries often went to waste. We knew there had to be a better way to make meal planning simpler and more personalized. This led to the creation of FreshFork, an AI-powered meal planner that helps users meet their diet goals while planning meals and managing groceries based on their personal preferences. With FreshFork, users can finally stop worrying about what's for dinner.

What it does

-Personalized Meal Plans: FreshFork gathers user information through a questionnaire, covering diet goals, food allergies, preferred cuisines, kitchenware, and taste preferences. -Meal Generation: Using this data, the app generates meal plans for multiple days, complete with ingredients, cooking instructions, and nutritional details (calories, carbs, protein, fat). -Ingredient-Based Suggestions: FreshFork can also recommend meals based on the ingredients available at home, replacing any meals the user is not interested in with something new and trendy.

How we built it

-Idea and Technology: We initially brainstormed various ideas, but FreshFork stood out because of its ability to use AI (Google Gemini’s Prompt API) to create a personalized and flexible meal-planning experience. The app would address a real-life problem we all faced—too much food waste and not enough meal flexibility. -Team Collaboration: We divided into specialized roles: the UI/UX team designed the user interface and wireframes in Figma (including the questionnaire, home dashboard, meal plan page, and AI bot page); the front-end team built the user interface in React, ensuring it was responsive and dynamic; and the back-end team focused on developing APIs to process user inputs and generate meal plans using the Prompt API. Everyone worked in sync to bring FreshFork to life. -Integration: We used Google Gemini's Prompt API to power our meal plan generation. The front-end team implemented a smooth, interactive interface for users, while the back-end team focused on making sure the app could handle the complex logic of generating personalized plans.

Challenges we ran into

-API Testing: During development, we ran into issues with the Google Prompt API’s output, which was often unstructured and difficult to parse. After multiple iterations, we adjusted the prompt to ensure the model generated a more consistent and structured response that we could work with. -Token Limitations: We also encountered token limits with the API, which restricted the amount of data we could generate at once. To overcome this, we split the process into two parts: one to generate meal names and another to generate detailed information about each meal.

Accomplishments we are proud of

-AI Integration: We are proud to have successfully integrated Google Gemini’s Prompt API into FreshFork. Despite the challenges with formatting and token limits, we created a system that generates well-structured meal plans, complete with recipes and nutritional information. -User-Centric Design: Our UI/UX team designed a simple and intuitive user experience in Figma that guides users from the initial questionnaire to their meal plans and ingredient recommendations with ease. We are particularly proud of how easy and fun it is for users to navigate.

What we learned

-Team Collaboration: As a team, we learned how to collaborate effectively, with each of us focusing on our areas of expertise: UI/UX design, front-end development, and back-end development. This division of labor allowed us to stay focused while also integrating our work seamlessly. -Understanding Google Gemini’s Prompt API: We also gained valuable insights into working with the Google Gemini API, especially in terms of prompt engineering and managing token usage to get the results we wanted.

What's next for Freshfork - personal AI meal planner

-Grocery Integration: We’re planning to integrate grocery purchase APIs, like InstaCart, so that users can not only plan meals but also purchase the required groceries directly from the app, creating a seamless experience from meal planning to shopping. -Mobile Version: We’ll be developing a mobile version of FreshFork to allow users to access their meal plans and grocery lists on the go. -AI Features: We are considering adding chat-based dietary advice and automatic inventory tracking based on user purchases and meal plans. -Community Sharing: We also want to build a community feature where users can share their favorite meals and plans with others, allowing for inspiration and learning from each other.