Inspiration
What inspired us to create this template was our personal experiences as individuals who live alone and cook for ourselves on a daily basis. We found ourselves often discarding expired items that we had forgotten about in the fridge or stored in the depths of our pantries. Moreover, we empathized with the challenge of coming up with inventive recipes to utilize our ingredients on hand before they went bad. The Coda's AI at Work Challenge gave us the opportunity to put an end to these kitchen woes by creating a template that streamlines the processes of ingredient tracking, recipe generation, and meal planning!
What it does
This template allows users to enter grocery items they have at home and instantaneously receive a curated list of AI-generated recipes tailored to the available ingredients. Furthermore, it contains a user-friendly meal planner to help track of meals they’ve made throughout the week, ensuring a healthy variety and preventing repetitive dishes. This unique toolkit allows users to save time and reduce food waste, all while expanding upon their culinary repertoire and discovering new flavors with ingredients they already have at home.
How we built it
To establish a roadmap for this template's development, we began by outlining the functionalities we wanted to include, ranking them in order of priority. Next, we extensively explored Coda's built-in functions, learning how to leverage the AI feature, construct tables, and store and manage information efficiently. Then, we began concretizing our vision by implementing the desired functionalities into the template, seeking guidance from office hours and the Coda community. We built an inventory for users to input their specific grocery items and corresponding quantities as well as an AI-generated meals table that references this inventory to automatically generate recipes utilizing the available ingredients. We also created a calendar view where users can easily visualize their weekly or monthly meal plan. Lastly, we directed our attention to the aesthetics of this template, designing a visually appealing and user-friendly interface.
Challenges we ran into
During the development process, we encountered a challenge with automating the deduction of ingredient quantities from the inventory when users mark a meal as 'Made.' We explored various techniques, including refining the AI prompt, creating additional columns that link across tables, and reaching out to the Coda support team, to no avail. As we were unable to achieve the desired functionality, we focused on finding alternative solutions to enhance the user experience. For example, we integrated a Unit Converter function to allow users to easily convert and update ingredient quantities.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our greatest accomplishment was effective teamwork, communication, and collaboration. Despite working remotely over Zoom, we consistently held meetings every day over a two-week period, ensuring that we stayed on track with our agenda and continued propelling our project forward. While we may have faced certain limitations in implementing all of the features we initially envisioned, we nevertheless made a concerted effort to attempt their integration and proactively strategize new ideas.
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