Smart Pantry
Smart Pantry tracks what's in the kitchen and when it expires, builds the shopping list on its own, suggests recipes through an assistant called Iron Chef, and runs a community marketplace for surplus food.
- Built with
- React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Flask (Python), Supabase, Edge Functions, Vercel
15% less weekly grocery spend, by tracking stock, building the shopping list for you and suggesting recipes from what's already there.
The problem
Pantry apps die at data entry. Nobody types in thirty items after a grocery run, so the app goes stale and food goes off anyway.
So the first job was retiring the form: three ways to log food, none of them typing.
- Model call
- A person decides
- Data or tool
Decisions that mattered
- Three capture modes, no forms
- A barcode lookup, an OCR reader for grocery bills and a voice assistant each run as their own edge function. A whole grocery run gets logged without typing.
- Households are walled off in the database
- Each household's data is separated at the database layer with row-level security, not in application code, so a bug in a screen can't leak another family's pantry.
- Surplus goes somewhere
- Items about to expire can be sold or donated through a community marketplace, with orders and sales tracked for both sides.
- A reason to come back
- Consumption and spending analytics show where the money went, and achievements reward cutting waste, which keeps the pantry up to date.
| Feature | Built with |
|---|---|
| Barcode capture | Browser scanner and a product-lookup edge function |
| Bill reader | OCR edge function over a photo of the receipt |
| Voice assistant | Voice-command edge function |
| Iron Chef recipes | Chat edge function with the pantry as context |
| Backend | Flask and Supabase, hosted on Vercel |
What I'd do next
- Predict when staples will run out from consumption history, not just from expiry dates.