reFresh
ingredient manager with recipe suggestions
live: https://refresh.jestev.es/
source code: https://github.com/utad-reFresh
Context
Final year project aimed at cutting food waste: the Android app (Kotlin) lets you log the ingredients you have at home, manually or via barcode scan against Open Food Facts, and suggests recipes before they spoil, with expiry alerts and favourites. The backend (ASP.NET Core + Blazor, PostgreSQL, JWT) searches its local database for recipes first and only falls back to the external Spoonacular API when there aren't enough results, caching whatever it finds for future requests.
Technical challenges
- hybrid local + external API, to save quota — the backend only reaches out to Spoonacular when a recipe or ingredient isn't already in the local database, avoiding wasted quota on repeated requests
- barcode scanning — the phone scans a barcode and the backend looks it up against Open Food Facts, caching the result keyed by the barcode itself so an already-seen product is never requested again
- converting between external data sources — each API describes products and ingredients its own way, with no shared ID between them; the backend tries to find the closest match rather than assuming the data lines up
- normalising external data — Spoonacular returns quantities in a mix of imperial and metric units; the backend converts everything to a consistent format
- app and API sync — keeping the phone's ingredient list consistent with the backend, especially offline, with JWT authentication on every request
Screenshots
