Hackathon 2026 Proposal

FridgeWise

Your AI meal planning assistant. Snap your fridge, import any recipe, plan your week.

The Problem
01

Recipes are everywhere, usable nowhere

Instagram reels, TikTok videos, SEO-stuffed blogs, grandma's handwritten cards. None translate to actionable ingredient lists or portions.

02

Massive food waste

The average household wastes ~30% of purchased food. People forget what's in the fridge, buy duplicates, and things expire unused.

03

Nutrition is disconnected

People track macros in one app and browse recipes in another. Nutrition is never part of the "what should I cook" decision.

04

The planning gap

"Given what's in my fridge + what I like + my nutritional needs + my budget — what should I eat this week and what do I need to buy?"

The Solution

An AI-powered app that answers: "What do I eat this week?"

Take in your food (fridge photo or grocery list), your recipe sources (Instagram, blogs, handwritten cards), and your nutritional goals. Output a weekly meal plan with a grocery list of only what you need to buy.

Flow 1

Snap Your Fridge

Take a photo of your fridge. AI identifies every item — produce, dairy, proteins, condiments — and builds your inventory.

Flow 2

Import Recipes From Anywhere

Paste an Instagram reel URL, a blog link, or snap a photo of a handwritten recipe. AI extracts a structured recipe with ingredients and steps.

Flow 3

Plan My Week

AI combines what you have + recipes you like + nutritional targets to generate a 7-day meal plan optimized for minimal waste.

Flow 4

Output

A smart grocery list (only what's missing) OR recipes that use only what's already in your fridge. Emailed to you every Sunday.

Build Plan — Two Parallel Workstreams
TEAM A

Full App & Meal Planning

Build the end-to-end product with manual inputs. Owns the core experience so we have a working demo regardless of the AI parsing work.

In Scope
  • Manual fridge inventory entry (type what you have)
  • Import recipes from blog URLs and written/pasted text
  • Meal plan generation from inventory + recipes + nutrition goals
  • Smart grocery list output (only what's missing)
  • Weekly email digest + expiration alerts
  • User accounts, state, and household sync
Out of Scope (handed to Team B)
  • Fridge photo → ingredient list
  • Instagram / video → recipe
Workers Pages Durable Objects Workers AI (LLM) Browser Run (blogs) Email Service Sandboxes D1 Turnstile
TEAM B

Image & Video → Recipe

Build the AI parsing pipelines as standalone services with clean APIs. Plugs into Team A's app via a shared contract (structured recipe / ingredient JSON).

In Scope
  • Fridge photo → ingredient list (vision AI)
  • Object detection + quantity estimation
  • Instagram / TikTok URL → extract video
  • Video → audio → transcript → structured recipe
  • Handwritten recipe card → OCR → recipe
  • Return standardized JSON to Team A's API
Interface Contract
  • POST image → returns ingredient[]
  • POST URL → returns recipe{}
Workers Workers AI (Vision) Workers AI (Whisper) Browser Run Containers R2 KV (cache)
Integration point: Both teams agree on a shared JSON schema up front — ingredient[] and recipe{}. Team B's endpoints are drop-in replacements for Team A's manual inputs, so the app works with mock data on day one and gets smarter as Team B ships.
Cloudflare Product Map
ProductHow We Use It
Workers REQUIRED Core API layer — orchestrates image uploads, recipe parsing requests, meal plan generation, grocery list compilation, and all routing
Cloudflare Pages REQUIRED Frontend app — camera UI for fridge photos, URL paste for recipe import, weekly meal plan viewer, interactive grocery checklist
Workers AI BONUS The AI brain — vision models for fridge scanning, LLMs for recipe extraction and meal planning, Whisper for transcribing recipe videos (see models below)
Browser Run REQUIRED Scrape recipe blogs (renders JS-heavy sites), extract video URLs from Instagram pages, generate shareable meal plan images and PDFs
Durable Objects REQUIRED Per-user state via SQLite — fridge inventory, saved recipes, weekly plans, dietary preferences. Real-time sync for shared household accounts
Containers REQUIRED Heavy processing — video frame extraction from recipe reels, OCR on handwritten recipe cards, nutritional database computation
Workers for Platforms REQUIRED Let nutritionists and meal kit companies deploy their own branded FridgeWise with custom recipe databases and dietary rules
Email Service REQUIRED Weekly meal plan + grocery list every Sunday. "Your avocados expire in 2 days — here are 3 recipes" expiration alerts
Sandboxes REQUIRED Users write custom dietary rules as code: "never suggest pork," "maximize protein on gym days," "kid-friendly only on weekdays"
Turnstile EXTRA Protect expensive AI endpoints (fridge scanning, recipe import) from bot abuse and rate-limit circumvention
D1 EXTRA Global recipe database, user accounts, nutritional reference data (USDA food database)
R2 EXTRA Store uploaded fridge photos, recipe images, and generated meal plan PDFs
KV EXTRA Cache parsed recipes so the same blog URL or Instagram link is never re-scraped
Vectorize EXTRA Semantic recipe search — "find something like grandma's chicken soup but vegetarian"
9
Required Products
5
Bonus Products
14
Total CF Products
Workers AI Models Used
llama-3.2-11b-vision-instruct
Fridge photo → ingredient identification. Describe what's in the image, estimate quantities, identify produce freshness.
detr-resnet-50
Object detection in fridge photos. Localize individual items before passing to the vision model for identification.
llama-4-scout / gemma-4
Recipe extraction from scraped text, meal plan generation, nutritional analysis, grocery list optimization.
whisper-large-v3-turbo
Transcribe audio from Instagram/TikTok recipe videos into text for recipe parsing.
Key Pipeline: Instagram Video → Usable Recipe

How we turn a recipe reel into a grocery list

This is the core technical differentiator. A few hundred lines of code using CF products.

1

User pastes Instagram URL

Pages → Workers

Frontend sends the URL to the API

2

Scrape the page, extract video

Browser Run

Renders the JS-heavy Instagram page in headless Chrome, extracts the video source URL

3

Download and extract audio

Containers

Downloads video, extracts audio track using ffmpeg in a container

4

Transcribe speech to text

Workers AI · Whisper

Audio → full text transcript of the recipe narration

5

Parse into structured recipe

Workers AI · LLM

Transcript → JSON: { title, ingredients[], steps[], servings, prep_time, nutrition }

6

Store and display

D1 + R2 → Pages

Recipe saved to database, image stored, displayed in the user's recipe collection

Why This Wins
🍭

Real Problem

Everyone eats. Everyone wastes food. Everyone hates meal planning. Universal appeal.

📸

Great Demo

Live fridge photo scan is a crowd-pleaser. Paste an Instagram link, watch a recipe appear in seconds.

🤖

14 CF Products

Every product has a justified, organic role. Nothing feels forced or bolted on.

Technically Impressive

Vision AI + video transcription + browser scraping + real-time state. Judges will notice.

📦

Buildable in a Day

Core loop (photo → ingredients → recipe → list) is a few hundred lines. Layer features incrementally.

🌎

Not CF-Related

It's a consumer food app. Fully compliant with "not related to Cloudflare" rule.