SmartRation

Inspiration

We wanted to tackle two huge pain points for under-resourced households: stretching a tight grocery budget and minimizing food waste. By combining off-the-shelf OCR and computer-vision models with powerful LLMs, we realized you could turn a simple snap of your fridge plus yesterday’s receipt into a fully personalized, budget-smart meal plan.

What it does

SmartRation packs five core features into one seamless dashboard:

FoodGPT Chat Assistant – Ask for recipe ideas, cooking tips, dietary advice, and personalized meal suggestions in natural language. – Handles follow-up questions about allergies, household size, spice tolerance, and budget limits.
Upload Receipt OCR – Snap or upload your grocery receipt to instantly extract items, quantities, and prices. – Automatically logs your spending to inform every downstream feature.
AI Meal Plans – Generate a 7-day, 3-meals-per-day plan tailored to your budget, preferences, and what’s in your fridge. – Slide through daily cards, pick between variations, or hit “Regenerate” for fresh ideas.
Smart Shopping List Generator – Based on your remaining ingredients, meal plan, and spending cap, build a budget-optimized shopping list. – Group items by store sections or preferred grocery APIs (Kroger, Walmart, etc.) for the fastest trip.
Saved & Rated Meals – Bookmark your favorite dishes and rate each meal after you cook it. – View past successes at any time and let FoodGPT learn from your ratings to refine future recommendations.

How we built it

Frontend: typescript, tailwind css, shadn UI.

Backend: Supabase for auth, Postgres tables (profiles, receipts, meal_plans, foodgpt_messages) with RLS.

OCR: Google Vision Cloud API

LLM: Anthropic Claude 2

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble training the OCR to recognize different receipt formats and types to improve its accuracy. We had to become prompt engineers for claude and its uses to create a curated shopping list and our own fine-tuned chatbot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the accuracy of our image detection software and our use of 3 apis.

What we learned

We learned a lot about prompt engineering and how providing excellent context is most beneficial. We learned about creating an amazing impact in such a short period. We all feel motivated by this to continue to create and learn.

What's next for SmartRation

We want to continue making our OCR detection more accurate and then integrate grocery shop apis to further get accurate food details. We want to get a customer and user base going so that our app creates value for those who need it.