Recipe Checkout

Inspiration

When trying a new recipe, nothing is more frustrating than going to a store to buy the ingredients and not being able to find them, one random ingredient being out of stock, or (emotionally) worse: walking every aisle 14 times because you don’t know ahead of time what items are in what aisle and just go down the list of ingredients! RecipeCheckout fixes that, ensuring each grocery trip is not only a success, but an efficient one.

What it does

Just paste a recipe link or enter an ingredients list. RecipeCheckout can take either format and turn it into a grocery store friendly shopping list. Then it lets you tell it what you have and don’t have. It finds the closest stores selling them, giving you information like quantity, price, whether it is in stock, the aisle number of the product, and your options for getting everything even if it’s not at all one store.

How we built it

Agentic engineering and careful human architecting!

Challenges we ran into

Many recipe sites Cloudflare protection settings refuse requests from Vercel’s servers, thankfully the wayback machine catalogues them frequently anyways (most of the time). So when we get blocked by the original site we still have a way to find the recipe! We also added a way to just paste the ingredients directly if for some reason the site is both blocked because of Cloudflare and not archived.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Turning our brainstorming into a real product: watching it go from an idea to a deployed website that we were able to fully implement. We’re quite happy with the idea itself too, it is a genuinely useful tool that we want to use ourselves next time we go shopping!

What we learned

We had the opportunity to learn a lot! Half of our members were brand new to hackathons and were freshmen, so they were able to learn/experience the full stack SWE process that they might not otherwise have till interning.

What's next for RecipeCheckout

Beyond just finding and displaying ingredients from your local stores we hope to make RecipeCheckout a more holistic experience. Ultimately, we would develop RecipeCheckout to help suggest dishes according what a user already has, suggest recipes based on a user’s taste, find ingredients, and actually help you cook with an AI assistant (perhaps powered by GPT live) that interacts with you: verbally prompting you on the next steps, ingredient quantities, and responding to any questions you might have about the recipe.