Gather
Designed and built a mobile grocery planner that finds recipes sharing the same fresh ingredients, so nothing I buy goes to waste.
- Role
- Solo: concept, design, and build
- Designed & built with
- Claude Design, Claude Code
- Stack
- Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase, Vercel
Open the live demo Why I Made It
Wasting food is such a terrible feeling.
I love to cook, and I'm guilty of the same thing every week: I buy a bag of spinach for one recipe, forget about it, and then it goes bad. It's always the produce!
Grocery shopping could be a chore, too. I'm always saving recipes, and before every trip I'd try to combine their ingredients into one list in my notes app.
So I thought of an app that could do both! It helps me plan meals that share ingredients, and it gives me one consolidated list to shop from. I built it for myself and my friends.
What It Does
Plan recipes
Browse a library of recipes I like, and see which sides and other dinners reuse the fresh ingredients a recipe leaves behind.
Shopping list
Add recipes to a trip and every ingredient merges into one consolidated list to shop from.
Waste less
Pairings are built around produce and other things that spoil, not around onions and pantry items that keep for weeks.
Know your pantry
Mark the staples you always have, so you know what you can cook without buying more.
What I Learned
Thinking like a developer
I owned the whole thing end to end, from a live database and sign-in to hosting and deploying from my terminal. It gave me a greater appreciation for everything beyond my role as a designer.
Data shapes the experience
The pairing idea only works if every recipe spells an ingredient the same way. “Scallions” and “green onions” being two different things in the data meant two recipes would never match.
Designing around what the system can’t know
The app can’t tell what size bag you bought, and recipes measure the same ingredient in grams, cups, or “one.” I had to design honest answers to that, like showing estimates as estimates.
Directing AI is a design skill
My job was deciding what to build, noticing when something felt wrong, and giving it design critique in real time.
What's Next
Keep growing the recipe library, and keep using it every week.