Totie: We've Got Food @ Home (Inspired by Eitan Bernath)

Totie, your kitchen companion makes cooking fun and resourceful by extracting recipes from videos, cookbooks, & screenshots, tracking your pantry, & matching ingredients to meals you can cook at home.

Comment

Inspiration

Inspired by Eitan Bernath’s mission to make cooking more fun and resourceful, Totie was built to solve a real, everyday problem: people are surrounded by food at home but still order delivery.

We constantly save recipes, buy groceries, and scroll cooking videos — yet still say, “We’ve got no food at home.”

The issue isn’t food scarcity. It’s friction.

Modern cooking content lives everywhere — TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, cookbooks — but it’s fragmented and disconnected from what is actually in your kitchen.

If we simplify home cooking:

$$ Cooking\ Success = Available\ Ingredients + Clear\ Recipe + Low\ Friction $$

Most apps solve only one variable.

Totie was designed to solve all three.

What it does

Totie is an AI kitchen companion that:

  • Extracts recipes from videos, cookbooks, and screenshots
  • Tracks your pantry inventory
  • Matches ingredients to cook-now meals
  • Turns what you already have into real meals

Instead of asking, “What should I order?” Totie answers, “Here’s what you can cook right now.”

By combining AI extraction with pantry-aware intelligence, Totie reduces delivery dependency and food waste while making cooking feel simple and achievable.

How we built it

Totie was built using Rork AI App Builder to rapidly prototype and iterate the full mobile experience.

Rork allowed us to:

  • Structure the app architecture quickly
  • Generate UI flows and screens efficiently
  • Implement AI-powered recipe extraction workflows
  • Connect pantry tracking logic to meal-matching systems
  • Iterate on the freemium subscription model

Using Rork significantly reduced development friction and allowed us to focus on product logic instead of boilerplate setup.

The core ingredient-matching logic can be simplified as:

$$ Match\ Score = \frac{Ingredients\ You\ Have}{Ingredients\ Required} $$

The higher the ratio, the more viable the meal suggestion.

The app was built using React Native with Expo, AI-powered parsing for recipe extraction, pantry state management, and RevenueCat for subscription handling.

Challenges we ran into

1. Content Structuring

Recipes from screenshots and videos are inconsistent. Converting them into structured ingredient lists required careful parsing logic and iteration.

2. UX Friction

If tracking your pantry feels like work, users won’t do it. The interface had to feel playful and lightweight.

3. Behavioral Change

Totie isn’t just a recipe app. It encourages a mindset shift: Cook first. Order second.

Designing around that psychology was just as important as the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Successfully built a working AI-powered recipe extraction system using Rork
  • Designed pantry-aware ingredient matching that delivers real cook-now suggestions
  • Created a companion-style experience rather than another static recipe database
  • Implemented a freemium subscription model using RevenueCat
  • Combined AI logic with behavioral psychology to improve engagement

One of the most meaningful accomplishments was intentionally designing Totie as a companion, not just a utility.

In simplified behavioral terms:

$$ Retention \propto Emotional\ Connection $$

The stronger the emotional connection, the higher the likelihood of continued use.

What we learned

  • AI is most powerful when it removes small daily friction.
  • Users don’t lack food — they lack clarity.
  • Rapid iteration with Rork makes it possible to go from idea to working AI product faster than ever.
  • Emotional design matters just as much as technical execution.

What's next for Totie: We've Got Food @ Home (Inspired by Eitan Bernath)

Next steps include:

  • Expanding AI extraction to support more content formats
  • Improving ingredient substitution suggestions
  • Enhancing food waste tracking analytics
  • Adding deeper personalization and meal intelligence
  • Scaling the companion experience with more interactive guidance
  • Exploring partnerships with creators and culinary educators aligned with Totie’s mission, including potential collaboration opportunities with Eitan Bernath

The long-term vision is to turn kitchens into intelligent systems that reduce food waste and delivery dependency.

Because most of the time…

We really do have food at home.

Built With

  • android
  • asyncstorage
  • customcomponentlibrary
  • customonboardingflow
  • expo.io
  • exporouter
  • gamification
  • haptics
  • image
  • ios
  • linking
  • lucidereactnative
  • react
  • react-native
  • reactnativeanimatedapi
  • revenuecat
  • rork
  • rorkbackendapi
  • typescript
  • web
  • web-(cross-platform-via-expo)-navigation-&-routing:-expo-router-(file-based-routing)-apis-&-services:-revenuecat-(in-app-purchases-&-subscriptions)-rork-backend-api-(data-storage)-key-libraries:-expo-(camera
Share this project:

Updates