Pantry

Managing stock, grocery expenses, and meal planning is challenging and expensive. The community needs an affordable, and easy to use solution. Enter Pantry

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Inspiration

As student, meal planning, expense tracking, and stock management has always been challenging. It required a lot of manual time and effort to take inventory, and compute my expenses on groceries with saved up receipts. I longed for an easy-to-use platform where I can easily track my pantry.

What it does

Pantry is an all-in-one personal item stock management platform which at it's core allows users to view their personal pantry.

Users are able to upload images of their receipts to easily make additions to their pantry. Our platform will automatically recommend recipes, and meals you can make with items available in your stock, as well as keep track of your expenses with a comprehensive dashboard, graphing your grocery expenses for the year.

How we built it

We used a standard three tier architecture. Our backend comprises of PostgreSQL, and Redis for our data layer, along with Node.js and Express. We used Next.js, and React for our frontend.

We use the following third party services: Auth0 for authentication/authorization, Gemini API for our Generative AI, and the Edamam Recipe Search API.

Challenges we ran into

One challenging aspect of the application was efficiently handling large streams of pantry data when creating recommendations, and graphing. We managed to speed up requests by using Redis to cache commonly queried recipes, and graph data. Creating a good user experience was also another challenging aspect of our appplication, as we aimed to simplify, and automate the process of data entry for groceries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our receipt scanning feature. We developed an elegant, efficient and easy to use receipt scanning workflow, which allows the user to quickly log their groceries for the day.

What we learned

We learned a lot about prompt engineering, building an attractive frontend with good UX, and interfacing with Generative AI.

What's next for Pantry

We had the following goals in mind:

  • Creating a meal planning feature which will provide users with meal plans based on their dietary restrictions, fitness goals, and preferences.
  • Creating a Pantry mobile app so users can easily take a picture of their receipts on the go.
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