Willow Nutrition

Inspiration

The idea came during a dinner with a friend whose wife was pregnant. As we looked through the menu, she had to avoid several items and even confirm with the waiter what was safe. It highlighted how unclear food safety can be during pregnancy. Many women want to make sure what they eat supports a healthy baby, but it isn’t always obvious—even before pregnancy. This inspired me to create a tool that makes those decisions simple.

What I Built

I built Willow Nutrition, an app that allows women to:

• Scan food to see if it’s safe during pregnancy.
  
• Get guidance in grocery stores and restaurants on what to choose.
  
• Log meals and track macronutrients to ensure balanced nutrition.
  

How I Built It

The project was developed with Expo. I leaned heavily on “vibe coding,” pushing the workflow to its limits while traveling through Europe. From just my phone, I ran prompts to cloud-based coding agents (gpt-t, claude opus) which generated pull requests. GitHub Actions then triggered over-the-air updates to my TestFlight build. This let me continuously test and ship progress without needing a laptop.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was building while traveling. Relying on phone-based prompts, cloud agents, and automated pipelines required discipline and creative workarounds. But this also proved the viability of mobile-first development workflows.

Learnings

• Pregnant women face real information gaps around food safety and nutrition.
  
• Lightweight, phone-first workflows can power serious development if pipelines are automated well.
  
• Constraints like travel can drive efficiency and focus.
  

Built With

• bun-tooling
• expo-camera/image/haptics/updates
• gpt-5
• nativewind-(tailwind-css)
• openai
• react-hook-form-with-zod
• react-native
• react-native-(expo-sdk-53)-+-expo-router
• react-native-reanimated-&-gesture-handler
• revenuecat-sdk
• vercel-serverless-(node.js)-api
• zustand-+-asyncstorage