SmartMart

Presentation

Inspiration

SmartMart was born out of a simple but persistent frustration: cooking at home often feels more expensive and complicated than it should be. As avid home cooks and tech enthusiasts, we noticed that while there are countless recipe apps, few actually help you cook smarter-balancing taste, cost, and convenience. We were inspired by the rise of AI-powered tools and the realization that, with the right technology, anyone could access affordable, delicious meal ideas tailored to their budget and preferences.

What it does

SmartMart is an AI-powered app that helps you cook smarter and cheaper by comparing recipes based on price, taste, and convenience. Here’s how it works:

Recipe Comparisons: Enter your ingredients, dietary preferences, or budget, and SmartMart instantly generates a list of recipe options.

Cost Optimization: Each recipe is ranked by real-time ingredient prices from local grocery stores, so you always know the cheapest, most delicious meal you can make.

Flavor Insights: Recipes include taste profiles and user ratings, helping you choose meals you’ll actually enjoy.

Personalized Suggestions: The app learns your preferences over time-whether you’re vegan, gluten-free, or just looking for quick weeknight dinners.

Smart Shopping Lists: Once you pick a recipe, SmartMart creates a shopping list optimized for price and convenience.

With SmartMart, you can confidently answer the age-old question, “What’s for dinner?”-without breaking the bank or sacrificing flavor.

How we built it

Research & Design
We began by mapping the user journey, identifying key pain points in meal planning and grocery shopping.
Data Collection with Apify
To ensure accurate, real-time pricing, we used Apify’s ALDI grocery scraper. This allowed us to gather up-to-date ingredient prices directly from a popular grocery chain, providing the foundation for our cost comparisons.
AI Integration with Perplexity and Factory AI
We leveraged Perplexity for recipe curation, enabling the app to surface relevant, high-quality recipes tailored to user preferences. Factory AI powered our recipe generation and comparison engine, analyzing ingredient lists, taste profiles, and dietary tags to recommend the best meal options for each user.

By combining robust data scraping, cutting-edge AI, and user-centered design, we built SmartMart to make smarter, cheaper, and tastier home cooking accessible to everyone.

Challenges we ran into

Data Quality & Integration Gathering reliable, up-to-date pricing and ingredient data was a major hurdle. Grocery data is messy and inconsistent, requiring robust cleaning and normalization before feeding it to the AI.

Infrastructure Real-time recipe generation and price comparison demand significant computational resources. We had to optimize our backend for speed and scalability to deliver instant results.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Seamless Data Collection with Apify: We’re thrilled with how Apify’s robust web scraping tools made it possible to gather accurate, real-time grocery pricing data at scale. The versatility and reliability of Apify’s platform allowed us to automate data extraction and power our recipe comparisons with up-to-date information, saving us countless hours and ensuring our users always get the best deals.

Advanced Search and Personalization with Perplexity: Integrating Perplexity’s state-of-the-art AI search capabilities enabled us to deliver highly relevant, conversational recipe suggestions. We leveraged Perplexity’s natural language processing and real-time information synthesis to make our recommendations smarter, more transparent, and tailored to individual tastes and budgets.

Rapid Development with Factory: Factory generated the foundational code for our project, accelerating our development process. This allowed us to focus on refining features and user experience, rather than spending valuable time on boilerplate setup.

Together, these tools empowered us to build a solution that truly helps users cook smarter and cheaper-delivering value, accuracy, and convenience beyond what we thought possible.

What we learned

Building SmartMart taught us that:

AI can generate recipes at scale that are budget conscious, far outpacing manual curation.

Users crave not just inspiration but actionable, cost-effective meal solutions.

Data quality is everything: for AI to compare recipes by price and taste, ingredient and pricing data must be accurate and up-to-date.

Personalization is key. People want meal ideas that fit their dietary needs, pantry, and wallet-not just generic recipes.

What's next for SmartMart

SmartMart is just getting started. We’re excited to keep improving our AI, expanding our recipe database, and helping more people cook smarter, cheaper, and more delicious meals every day