Thrifty Chef

Cook smarter, waste less. AI recipes from your fridge, expiry alerts, barcode scan, and meal plans that put expiring food first.

ThriftyChef helps you cook delicious meals from what you already have—and stop food from going to waste.

Track your fridge, prioritise ingredients that expire soon, and get personalised AI recipe recommendations ranked for match, safety, nutrition, and context.

SMART SAVINGS. DELICIOUS MEALS.

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Smart AI Recommendations: Get instant recipe ideas based entirely on your current ingredients and dietary preferences. • Track Your Inventory: Easily manage fridge, freezer, and pantry items with automated tracking and expiry date alerts. • Quick Barcode Scanning: Scan product barcodes instantly when stocking up your kitchen or buying grocery items. • Transparent Recommendations: See exactly why each recipe was recommended with clear, data-driven explanations. • Customized Dietary Filters: Apply hard filters for diets and allergies, including vegetarian, vegan, halal, and common allergens. • Ingredient Substitutes: Cooking something new? Find quick, smart alternatives for unfamiliar or missing ingredients. • Weekly Meal Planning: Build an optimized weekly menu that automatically uses up your expiring items first. • Leftover Transformer: Turn last night's leftovers into fresh, creative meal ideas with a single tap. • Smart Shopping Lists: Automatically generate a shopping list for the missing ingredients you need to complete a recipe. • Step-by-Step Cooking Mode: Follow a guided, hands-free cooking mode with clear instructions while you prepare your meal. • Track Sustainability Impact: See your real-world impact grow with tracked metrics for food waste reduced, money saved, and unlockable eco-badges.

HOW RECOMMENDATIONS WORK ThriftyChef combines a multi-layered ranking system evaluating fridge match, expiry priority, nutrition signals, and your personal taste profile. Strict safety constraints, such as verified allergies and diet types, are applied as absolute filters before recipes are ranked and presented.

WHO IT’S FOR Students, busy households, and anyone who wants to waste less food, save money, and cook with confidence.

PROJECT CREDIT Developed as a Recommender Systems module project for the MSc in Artificial Intelligence program at Dublin Business School, Ireland.

Development Team: • Nathan Rocha (20082900) • Nadeesha Jayasuriya (20093736) • Emmanuel Addoh (10592825)

Lecturer: Nitya Govindaraju

Note: ThriftyChef is a product prototype.