I originally built this to help my wife with meal planning and grocery shopping. We were always struggling to decide what to make and inevitably forgot ingredients. Most meal planners felt too rigid or generic, and few handled the grocery side well (or at all). We've also used meal kits like Home Chef in the past but they end up being quite expensive and produce a comical amount of packaging waste, plus you still wind up needing to purchase groceries anyway. In all honesty, I also wanted an excuse to try building something "real" using AI and to see if it could be used in an actually useful manner.
Would love feedback from anyone interested in food, meal planning, or product design!
Tech stack:
- Cloud Run
- Firestore
- Vertex AI / Gemini
Worked real nice.
Did I make it into a business? Should everything be a SAAS? Nah.
You could make a website that does that in a couple of hours.
Time for Lunch.
Choose one of:
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Tuna salad: 1/2 cup tuna (drained) + 3 cups salad greens + 1/2 cup beetroot + vinegar/lemon (≈850 kJ)
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Egg salad: 2 boiled eggs (chopped) + 3 cups salad veg + 1/4 cup grated cheese (≈1000 kJ)
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Chicken salad bowl: 1/2 cup cooked chicken pieces + 3 cups salad veg (≈950 kJ)
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Minestrone soup: 2 cups (≈1060 kJ)
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Creamy chicken soup: 2 cups (≈1090 kJ)I'm looking for both an example of what to expect and inspiration for how I could be eating with your service.
I'd also recommend focusing on the API integrations, and/or whatever other features separate elevate this beyond asking $LLM for a weekly meal plan and shopping list taking into account dietary preferences.
Also 100% on messaging to differentiate from just using an LLM to do this yourself. This one feels a bit harder to me because I think it perhaps is not obvious until you get into the product and use it for a bit, though the integrations are a pretty good concrete example.
So I threw one together myself, but never quite finished it off, so very keen to use yours!
But the setup for this is overwhelming, so many forms. And then the meal plan is taking ages to generate.
I'd have bounced long ago if I was a normal person.
So it finally finished and I mentioned we regularly have a roast on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday and it decided to suggest a roast on Sunday and Tuesday.
Also image loading is very slow.
Think it's a great idea, generally looks pretty good, etc, just definitely look at the setup. I do think it pretty bloody slow though, and I'd love to switch meals, on mine you could just swipe left or right on a meal, it had actually generated 10 auggestions per day that you could rotate through to sorts customize it yourself. I didn't use AI on the fly though, I just had AI generated 1,000s of options up front and then randomized it.
The meal plan generation does take a bit, _typically_ it's around 90ish seconds but it does vary a lot. That's odd the images are loading slowly, I'll need to look into that.
You can ask for meal replacements (with or without input instructions) from the meal plan view. The replacements are not particularly snappy though. Trying to balance efficient usage of AI with a snappy UX is tricky.
But yeah, they were gradual rendering over 1-2 seconds.
I was on mobile, not sure if you've used responsive image sizing or not as it's a faff to inspect source, but if you haven't it's a game changer for making image heavy websites snappy.
Then again, depends where you're getting the images from, could just be you were getting throttled because you got a bit of a HN hug of death.
The big push on the website from my impression is that its a funnel to Instacart or Kroger. Does it limit its recipes to whats in stock around me? How accurate is the stock levels shown in the app?
Are you only limited to Kroger or Instacart to see what groceries are required for a recipe?
I didn't see any outward showing of family sharing either, such as a meal calendar.
Can you speak to how it handles dealing with preferences, e.g. no gluten or seafood? This is critical in surfacing recipes, to me accuracy on this is very critical.
The second big value prop for us has actually been the new "Quick Bites" feature which generates recipes based on ingredients you have on hand (either tracked in your pantry in the app or simply input manually). For instance, we'll often have some ingredients we want to use up but need suggestions on what to make. In this case, there's no grocery integration at all since we're using entirely stuff we already have.
Good question on the meal calendar. You CAN share meal plans (as well as recipes), though there isn't a calendar as such beyond the weekly meal plan view.
Preferences are primarily handled via the AI (uses Gemini on the backend) and this is the primary driver in how recipes are constructed and recommended.
The result is a very interruptible grocery list process, where I know I haven’t forgotten anything.
Edit: I see there is a nutrition facts button.
Is there a button I can press that says "suggest meals with more protein per serving"?
https://bsky.app/profile/davidwelton.bsky.social/post/3m34al...
What I've been working on for my own personal uses is a curated database that keeps track of ratings and numbers like perceived difficulty and actual time taken (these vary wildly from what they tell you). Then an algorithm that generates a plan based on given parameters for that week, mainly how much time you have and whether you want to try new things.
I also essentially rewrite all recipes in my own shorthand format which is based on how I think and execute the recipes in the kitchen. For example, I do mise en place for some things, but not others. I do chop all vegetables first, for example, but I don't pre-measure out all my spices because that's pointless.
Most off the shelf software has the wrong priorities for experienced cooks IMO. Like I don't need or care about the exact quantity required of tomatoes for the week. I just know this. I also don't need it to tell me I need e.g. turmeric. I cook mainly Indian food, I always have turmeric. I also haven't found one that understands meal prep or base ingredients that still need preparation (like cooked dal, dosa batter, masalas etc.)
My main problem is the analysis paralysis when deciding what to eat for the week. But using someone else's database for recipes is useless to me.
How is this $10 / month?!
it imagines that all food ingredients are generic and interchangable, that there is no significant seasonal variability in variety and quality the harshest part is that all of these schemes start out with a loss leader special arangement with supliers that sets people up with higher quality products at great prices, that are soon swaped out for whatever mass product at as high a price as the market will bear, the whole thing designed to create predictability for retailers and drive profits up. grossmart with delivery, and a chatbot foodporning in your ear. blech
I'm content to just keep healthy ingredients on hand and improvise, but I get that some people could want something with more structure.
Why bother with cookbooks when you can cook the statistical average of spaghetti carbonara ?
Why bother spending 10 minutes of brain power when you can just pay 9.99 a month for a machine to tell you what to do ?
Honestly, I wasn't sure if the AI recipes were going to meet her standards when it comes to food, but so far she's been quite happy overall with the recipe quality. She often will request replacements or customizations, so the first pass suggestions are not always what she's looking for.
I realize it's definitely not for everyone though.