Let Us Cook

Lobby Creation
Lobby
Recipe page
Top 5 recipes and flyers discounts
Fridge items
Recommendations by meals

Inspiration

Preparing and making food is an essential part of daily life, but it can feel overwhelming, especially when it’s time-consuming and expensive. With food prices soaring, finding affordable meal options has become more challenging than ever. That’s where Let Us Cook comes in—we make meal planning effortless by providing budget-friendly recipes and helping you find the cheapest grocery options near you.

What it does

Users build their fridges with ingredients they already have. We then recommend them with recipes based on those ingredients and indicate them if there are ingredients that can be bought at their local grocery stores. Also, there is a lobby feature where you can create and join lobbies and then spin the wheel to attribute choose the dish according to intolerances, specialties, dietery restrictions, etc.

How we built it

Frontend: react, Backend: flask, Spoonacular API

Challenges we ran into

We thought using OCR extraction with Tesseract would be doable but image extraction was more complicated than we thought. It was also the first time we did a project that required scraping.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the lobby community feature we implemented with the russian roulette mechanic and the web scraper that fetches groceries items on discount at from flyers.

What we learned

We learned that image extraction to text is difficult especially with flyers, where the products are all over the place. cv2 and Tesseract seems to work on well formatted and clean images but has a tough time with flyers. It takes about 18 email accounts to create this web app without paying any fees