After starting to cook, I realized how difficult it is to come up with recipes that would utilize the ingredients that I had in the fridge but still be appetizing. I found that there were many other people facing the same situation of wondering how to use up remaining groceries to avoid wasting food. In fact, food waste is a huge problem around the world—in 2024, the US discarded 60 million tons of food and the world wastes about 2.5 billion tons of food each year.

As a fun but hopefully impactful way to address this dire global problem, I decided to create an app that helps users generate recipes with main ingredients that they already have at home.

For this project, I had to first learn how to develop a mobile application, which I had no prior experience in. I did some research on different tech stacks, and ultimately decided to self-teach Flutter, Dart, and other mobile app development skills needed for the project.

As with other projects I had developed before, I narrowed down the features to be present in the minimum viable product (MVP) before beginning to actually code. This included a home page where users can search for any recipe, a “kitchen” page to save ingredients, and a page displaying appropriate recipe recommendations. I then also used Figma to help create a mid-fi version of what the app would look like.

One of the main difficulties of this project involved finding a source or database of recipes to generate suggestions to users from. I ultimately had to utilize the Web Scraper Dart Package to scrape recipes from AllRecipes.com.

Another challenge was figuring out how to connect the front-end to a database so that the app could save the ingredients that the users entered across sessions, which was important as this would power the main functionality of the app. I researched and learned how to design a Firebase Realtime Database to do such.

Foodie is not available for public use yet, however I look to continuing development of the app for eventual publication. Additionally, the development process of this app has been an invaluable experience and will help me create more sophisticated apps in the future.