Available groceries
Current pickup order
List of trips

BulkBridge

Inspiration

As first-year university students, most of us currently live in dorms with meal plans, which means we don’t have to think too much about grocery shopping or cooking. However, next year when we move into apartments or off-campus housing, that changes completely. Suddenly we have to buy groceries, cook meals, and manage food costs ourselves.

One problem we noticed is that bulk stores like Costco offer much cheaper prices, but the quantities are often too large for one person to buy and use before the food goes bad. At the same time, many students don’t know what to cook with the ingredients they already have, which can lead to food waste.

We wanted to create a platform that helps communities organize shared Costco trips and split bulk items fairly. At the same time, we wanted to build a tool that helps people turn the ingredients they already have into recipes, making cooking less intimidating for students living on their own for the first time.

What it does

BulkBridge is a mobile app that helps local communities coordinate Costco trips and split bulk grocery purchases.

Users can create or join communities based on their location. Within each community, members can organize shared Costco trips where one person acts as the runner who goes to the store and picks up items for others.

Community members can attach orders to a trip and claim portions of bulk items.

Example:

A 3-pack of bread can be split between three different users
Each user claims 1 loaf instead of purchasing the entire pack

Each trip includes useful information such as:

Runner’s name
Number of completed trips
Average rating
Number of attached orders

To encourage participation, runners earn points that can be redeemed for Gift Cards whenever they complete a trip.

AI Pantry Assistant

BulkBridge also includes an AI pantry assistant.

Users can speak into their microphone and list the ingredients they currently have. The system then:

Converts speech to text
Extracts pantry ingredients using AI
Generates recipe suggestions
Suggests missing ingredients and quantities

These suggested ingredients can be added directly to a grocery order.

BulkBridge minimizes waste by coordinating bulk purchases and recommending recipes based on existing ingredients.

How we built it

We built BulkBridge using a modern full-stack development stack.

Mobile Application

React Native
Expo
Tested with Expo Go

Expo allowed us to rapidly build and test a cross-platform mobile experience during the hackathon.

Backend

Next.js API routes
Prisma ORM
SQLite database
JWT cookie authentication

AI Features

Gemini API for ingredient extraction and recipe generation

To power the grocery ordering system, we imported a dataset containing approximately 900 Costco grocery items, allowing users to attach real bulk grocery products to trips.

Throughout the hackathon, we also used development tools such as:

Anti Gravity
Claude
ChatGPT

These tools helped us prototype features quickly, debug issues, and improve our system architecture.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was integrating Gemini into the Expo mobile environment. While our voice and AI features worked smoothly in the desktop web version, running them inside a mobile Expo application introduced several issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of several features that came together successfully during the hackathon.

Voice-to-Recipe Pipeline

Users can simply talk into their microphone and instantly receive recipe suggestions based on the ingredients they mention, along with suggested additional ingredients and quantities.

Trip Calendar Visualization

The trip calendar system makes it easy to visualize when community members are planning Costco trips and attach orders to those trips.

Multipack Splitting System

Our system allows users to fairly claim portions of bulk items rather than buying an entire multipack themselves.

Clean User Interface

We spent time making the UI intuitive and polished, including custom product images to make browsing groceries feel natural and easy.

Overall, we’re proud that we built a working full-stack system combining community coordination, grocery logistics, and AI-powered cooking assistance.

What we learned

This project helped us learn several new technologies and development practices.

Expo and React Native

We gained experience using Expo, which simplifies building React Native mobile apps by removing complex native configuration.

Using Expo Go, we could instantly test our mobile app on real devices during development.

AI API Integration

We also gained experience integrating AI APIs into real product workflows, including speech input, ingredient extraction, and recipe generation.

This taught us how challenging it can be to build reliable AI-powered features that work consistently across environments.

Development Tools

We also experimented with Anti Gravity, which helped accelerate development and allowed us to explore new workflows during the hackathon.

What's next for BulkBridge

There are several exciting directions we want to take BulkBridge in the future.

Dietary Restrictions

Users will be able to specify dietary needs such as:

Vegetarian
Vegan
Gluten-free
Allergies

Recipe suggestions and grocery recommendations will automatically adapt.

Personalized Meal Planning

Users will be able to set nutrition goals such as calorie targets or macronutrient ratios. The AI assistant could then generate meal plans and grocery lists optimized for those goals.

Nutrition and Macro Tracking

BulkBridge could track nutritional intake and help users plan meals that support fitness or health goals.

Price Optimization

We want to integrate flyer and deal tracking similar to apps like Flipp, allowing the system to recommend the cheapest purchasing strategy across stores and promotions.

Smarter Community Logistics

Future versions could automatically suggest the best trip times based on demand and optimize order batching across multiple Costco runs.

Our long-term vision is to turn BulkBridge into a smart grocery coordination platform that helps communities save money, waste less food, and cook smarter.