MEALCRAFT

Inspiration💡

We've all stood in front of the fridge thinking "What can I make with this?" — only to give up and order takeout. Meanwhile, the average household wastes 30% of their food every year.

We built MealCraft to solve both problems: reduce food waste AND make cooking feel like an adventure.

What It Does 🚀

MealCraft uses Google Gemini's vision AI to analyze a photo of your fridge or pantry. It identifies your ingredients and generates 5 personalized recipes with:

Step-by-step cooking instructions.
Full nutritional breakdown (calories, protein, carbs, fat).
One-click copy to share recipes instantly.

Our Minecraft-inspired UI makes meal planning feel like a game, not a chore. Upload your image, watch the AI "craft" your recipes, and start cooking!

How We Built It 🛠️

Layer	Technology
Frontend	Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
AI	Google Gemini 3 Pro via OpenRouter SDK
Design	Minecraft-themed UI with custom pixel art textures
Tooling	GitHub, Cursor AI editor
Testing	Vitest, React Testing Library, Playwright E2E

Challenges We Ran Into 😅

Git Collaboration as a Team - Practicing proper git usage, especially as a rookie team, was an initial struggle. We learned the importance of feature branches, writing clear PR descriptions, and resolving merge conflicts together.
Handling Large Image Uploads - Converting images to base64 for the OpenRouter API required careful handling to avoid performance issues and timeouts on larger files.
Balancing Theme with Usability - Creating an immersive Minecraft aesthetic while keeping the UI accessible and intuitive was a fun design challenge. We really wanted to bring this childhood game theme to life!