Hi, I’m a software engineer looking to create a free to use service to help people plan out meals and shopping lists to cut down on food wastage and eat more nutritional food.
My idea is to have a database of ingredients with their nutritional values and allow people to submit recipes that utilise said ingredients.
You as a user, when looking to do a shop, would use the app or site to specify how many meals you want to plan out, and also add any ingredients you want the meals to include, this can either be things you already know you have in, or that you plan on buying.
It will then use those ingredients to create as many meals as possible and then start trying to create the remaining meals, and suggest ingredients that need adding to the shopping list. I’d also like it to try and “nutritionally optimise” the recipes it suggest (hence why I’m here, I know nothing about nutrition).
I’m wondering if this already exists, I couldn’t find anything like what I’d like to create.
I know services like hello fresh exist that kinda somewhat do this, but I want to achieve something similar as far as reducing food waste, but allow people to purchase their own ingredients, and also introduce a nutrition balancing aspect to it.
I also know sites like https://www.eatthismuch.com/ exist, but I don’t know of anything that achieves both goals at once.
This is pretty much what I’m working on https://www.reciped.io. Haven’t really got to the nutritionally optimized piece yet. Meal planning is drag and drop, and it automatically creates a sorted(by grocery aisle) grocery list out of the planned meals. Wanted to do meal suggestions based on when local foods were in season. Would love to talk to you sometime if you’re into it.
So it does not do all things you describe like optimizing nutrition and making recipe suggestions based on ingredients. But Plantoeat organizes recipes (you can input or clip from web) and then add them to your planned with the number of desired servings and it makes a shopping list. You can then add ingredients and also put extra portions you made in the “freezer” to be available later on. Check it out, maybe get some ideas
You may want to use this api resource. https://github.com/ifct2017
It contains about nutrition for about 500 items.
Edit:I had a similar thought and found the above resources. I will be happy to collaborate with you.
sounds similar to shop n cook. I used the pro version of this software years ago to scale recipes and track cost/pricing. The personal version i’m not very familiar with but could help to provide inspiration to you.