GroceryKit

Turn recipe videos into grocery lists in seconds.

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Inspiration

It's a bit of a funny story. About a week before I found this contest, I was already discussing this exact idea with my coding partner. I was struggling to track salad recipes while monitoring my protein intake and the whole process felt unnecessarily clunky. Then I came across the Shipyard post on X, quoted by Ernesto Lopez (so grateful!), and it clicked immediately. I joined the contest and here I am, shipping my first iOS app that solves a problem I deal with personally.

What It Does

GroceryKit solves exactly the problem Eitan describes: the gap between discovering a recipe and actually cooking it.

Paste a recipe URL from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube and the app extracts the full ingredient list with quantities and categorizes everything by store section. One tap adds it to your shopping list.

Need to cook for more people? Scale the servings and all quantities update automatically. Every recipe also shows an estimated cook time and links back to the original creator's video.

There's also a pantry section. Log what you already have at home and move ingredients from your shopping list to your pantry so you never buy something you don't need.

How I Built It

I made full use of the Shipping Container resources and they genuinely helped me hit the ground running. I used Mobbin for UI/UX inspiration and Rork AI to scaffold the initial MVP, then built everything on top with Expo React Native.

For recipe parsing: Instagram and TikTok don't have open APIs, so I used Apify actors to scrape post content and fed the resulting JSON into Gemini 2.5 Flash. It turned out to be remarkably fast and accurate at extracting structured ingredient lists from unstructured captions. YouTube uses the official Data API.

For monetization, I integrated RevenueCat and connected it to iOS in-app subscriptions. Small first-timer confession: I genuinely loved watching transactions appear in the RevenueCat dashboard while testing with sandbox accounts. I also added PostHog for onboarding analytics and basic user behavior tracking.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was understanding how the Apple in-app purchase ecosystem works end to end, from App Store Connect configuration to wiring everything up with RevenueCat correctly. It took real effort to work through, but seeing "Ready to Submit" in App Store Connect was one of the most satisfying moments of the entire build.

On the UI/UX side, I struggled early on, so I studied competitors like Zest and Whisk closely, particularly their onboarding and paywall flows. That research had a meaningful impact on the final product.

Accomplishments

Building the app as a whole is what I'm most proud of. But if I had to pick two specific moments: getting the Apify integration working cleanly, and successfully connecting RevenueCat to live in-app purchases. Both required learning systems I had never worked with before, and I can already see myself reusing these patterns in future projects.

What I Learned

This project pushed me into territory I hadn't touched before.

I learned how web scrapers work in practice and, as a bonus, figured out how to access the native Instagram API along the way. I built a full RevenueCat integration from scratch, which meant understanding the entire Apple in-app purchase lifecycle. And I got much better at working across multiple AI models, using Claude for coding assistance and Gemini for real-time inference inside the app.

What's Next for GroceryKit

If I get selected!

  1. Direct share extension so users can send recipe links straight from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube without copy-pasting
  2. Multi-device sync, replacing AsyncStorage with a proper backend so data follows the user across devices
  3. Weekly meal planner where users can assign recipes to days and auto-generate a shopping list for the whole week
  4. Pantry-aware shopping lists that automatically exclude ingredients the user already has when adding a recipe
  5. Non-video recipe parsing to support blogs, AllRecipes, NYT Cooking, and any other recipe source
  6. A 'Cooked' button to log completed meals and track how many times users have prepared each recipe.

If I don't:

In Addition to the features that I mentioned above, I want to: Warm up 2-3 instagram accounts and start posting different formats to see which works and double down on them. I really look forward to using post bridge course and get my customers who have the same problem I do and hope this app solves that painful problem for them. :)

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