Munch'd

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Munch'd came from the everyday challenge of deciding what to eat—a common uncertainty that many of us face. We envisioned an all-in-one solution that seamlessly combines personalized recipe generation with accurate ingredient pricing. Instead of relying on multiple apps to plan meals, shop for ingredients, and manage your cooking experience, Munch'd offers a single, elegant platform that takes care of it all, making meal planning simple, fun, and efficient.

What it does

Our app is an innovative, AI-powered culinary platform that simplifies meal planning and cooking. It lets users create recipes based on their cravings using an intelligent chat bot, with each recipe featuring detailed images, descriptions, and the option to add ingredients to a shopping list or save for later.

Users can also explore a variety of meal options complete with ratings, prep time, price, ease, and nutritional info. With interactive features like swipe gestures and quantity adjustments, it's easy to tailor meal choices to personal preferences. Additionally, a favorites section keeps track of meals you love, and a comprehensive shopping list compiles all necessary ingredients—complete with images and prices—to streamline your grocery shopping experience.

How we built it

We built our app using React Native with ExpoGo client for a seamless mobile front end. For the chat bot, we integrated a ChatGPT wrapper to handle recipe generation. Newly personalized and created recipes are stored in a Firebase database. Lastly, we used Auth0 to manage secure user authentication.

Challenges we ran into

Our primary challenge was leveraging React Native for our first mobile application. We encountered difficulties in constructing essential components and features, particularly refining the swiping functionality on the Explore page. Additionally, integrating DALLE for image generation and implementing a reliable system to save recipes for later use presented further technical hurdles that required innovative solutions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is building a robust mobile app that tackles a common challenge—chronic uncertainty around cuisine choices. By integrating advanced AI for personalized recipe generation and interactive meal exploration, we've created a tool that empowers users to confidently decide what to eat, transforming the way they plan, shop for, and enjoy their meals.

What we learned

We learned a tremendous amount throughout this project, especially as we dove into a completely new tech stack. Using React Native with the Expo client pushed us to explore native mobile development from scratch. We became proficient in building robust components and integrating complex features like swipe gestures on the Explore page. Additionally, we gained hands-on experience integrating advanced AI tools, including the ChatGPT wrapper for recipe generation and DALLE for image creation. Overall, this project was a deep dive into modern mobile development and AI integration

What's next for Munch'd

For future work, we plan to enhance our app by implementing a quantity adjustment feature, enabling users to easily add multiple instances of the same meal. Additionally, we aim to refine our conversational interface by incorporating text-to-speech functionality—similar to ChatGPT's voice mode—so users can generate recipes using natural voice commands and engage in a conversational recipe walkthrough that guides them through each step of the cooking process. Our goal is for the language model to accurately learn user preferences and generate corresponding recipes on the Explore page, ensuring a smooth and personalized interaction throughout the app. Furthermore, we intend to integrate a grocery store API to replace our current estimates with precise ingredient pricing, thereby delivering a more accurate and reliable shopping experience.