Household Meal Planner with Food Waste Reduction

The problem households have with food waste

A lot of household food is thrown away for a banal reason: it was bought, forgotten and expired. The coriander wilts, the yoghurt goes sour, half a packet of chicken sits in the freezer until nobody trusts it. Most meal planners make this worse, because they pick recipes first and produce a shopping list that ignores what you already own.

Families who shop for the week, students sharing a flat, and anyone on a tight grocery budget feel this. Wasted food is wasted money, and planning around it by hand every week is tedious enough that nobody keeps it up.

What already exists and the gap

• SuperCook matches recipes to ingredients you already have, from a huge recipe index, but it is not a weekly planner and has no pantry aware shopping list.
• Mealime builds meal plans and shopping lists but does not know what is in your kitchen.
• NoWaste tracks expiry dates and alerts you before food goes off, but does not plan meals.
• KitchenPal combines pantry tracking, meal planning and expiry alerts in one app.

The gap is not features on a checklist. It is a planner that treats expiry as the main constraint, handles partial quantities and leftovers properly, and works for kitchens where much of the food is loose produce from a market with no barcode and recipes use local units. That is what you build, and it is small enough to finish properly.

What you build

Users are household members who share one pantry. Main flows:

• Add groceries after shopping (quick add by name, quantity and a default shelf life per item).
• Generate next week's plan; swap any meal and see the shopping list update.
• Mark a meal as cooked; the pantry is reduced and leftovers are added back.
• Log anything thrown away with a reason.

The technically interesting part

Partial quantities and planning. Recipes need half an onion and shops sell whole ones; a recipe uses 200 g of chicken from a 1 kg pack. The leftover must appear in the inventory with a new expiry and influence next week. Planning then becomes a small constraint problem: choose seven dinners that use the most soon-to-expire quantity, respect household preferences, and minimise extra shopping.

Start with a greedy algorithm (score each recipe by expiring quantity it uses, pick, subtract, repeat), then compare it with a slightly smarter search such as trying swaps to improve the total. Show your supervisor the scoring function, unit conversion tests, and a comparison of both approaches on the same pantries.

How to evaluate it

• Real use: three to five households use it for at least three weeks. Report logged waste before (one baseline week) and after, clearly marked as small scale and self reported.
• Planner quality: on 20 generated pantries, compare the share of expiring items used by the greedy and improved planners.
• Correctness: at least 30 unit tests for unit conversion, leftovers and shopping list aggregation.
• Usability: time for a user to add ten groceries and generate a plan; aim under three minutes.

Suggested plan

1. Week 1: interview three households about how they shop, cook and waste food.
2. Weeks 2 to 4: pantry, recipes, units and import from an open recipe dataset.
3. Weeks 5 to 7: planner, leftovers and shopping list with tests.
4. Weeks 8 to 10: household sharing, waste log and report.
5. Weeks 11 to 14: real use trial, planner comparison, write up.

Path to a product

First users are your own and your friends' households; student flats are a good pilot because they share food and argue about it. A free tier with a paid family plan is the usual model. A more interesting route is a partnership with a local grocery delivery service that wants its customers to buy what they will use, where the planner generates the basket.

Scope warning

Do not build a recipe database or scrape recipe sites; import an open dataset or let users enter their own. Do not add computer vision for fridge photos. Do not build native mobile apps; a responsive web app is enough.

Learn what you need on Sefism

• Full-stack roadmap : the order to learn front end, back end and database for this app.
• Frontend cheat sheet : forms and lists that are quick to use on a phone.
• Next.js Documentation : routing, server actions and data fetching for your stack.
• PostgreSQL Documentation : modelling quantities, units and constraints correctly.
• Can follow tutorials but cannot build anything alone : a good first real project for exactly this feeling.

Get help with this idea

This rewards depth of execution more than ambition. Tauseef can help you design the data model for units and leftovers, choose a planning approach you can explain, and run a small trial your examiners will respect. If you are new here, create a free account first.

• Discuss this idea with a mentor
• Send a query to Tauseef
• Book a 1:1 session