Team 2 – Hannah Walker, Piers Molenaar, Sarah Everke, Wojtek Deska
Integrating our goals into our daily lives and habits is a challenge many people can relate to in a multitude of areas. This is also the case in health and sustainability-related actions, which are often trending and on people’s minds but not always the easiest to apply in daily routines. So how do we turn intent into habitual action?
Our team has proposed an application that uses GenAI to generate recipes based on the user’s culinary preferences, health goals, and sustainability goals, combining multiple areas of consideration and delivering a convenient solution for users. The application would be available for mobile devices with iOS or Android systems through app stores to deliver efficient recipes to its customers. Food waste is a large, rising issue in the Netherlands and a policy priority. The Netherlands generated 2811 kilotons of food waste in 2020 (Knüppe & Lieshout, 2024). Together with the EU they have committed to halve retail and household food waste by 2030 under SDG 12.3. Additionally, about half of Dutch adults are overweight and 16% classified as obese (RIVM, 2022). There is a growing consumer interest in healthier diets; however, many struggle to turn these intentions into everyday choices. This highlights a need for practical and personalized tools. The application GenMeal is designed to tackle these problems together and create a convenient solution for users to make sustainable living more accessible.
The application adds value to the user in the following key ways:
- GenMeal combines multiple consumer needs (health, sustainability, convenience) and makes achieving these goals on a daily basis more accessible.
- The GenAI addition enhances the user experience after every use, so that the algorithm is always learning and attuning more to the user’s preferences and needs. It can learn from user’s actions such as additional requests, rejected recipes, and feedback.
- The GenAI allows the user to identify available food items through photo recognition software and suggests ways to use leftovers and reduce food waste.
The user experience can generally be broken down into two main functions: the user’s input and the application’s output. Initially in the set-up phase, the user must input their preferences, dietary restrictions, and answer further questions to personalize their profile and give the application enough information to ensure that the generated recipes are as personalized as possible. Once this is done, the user can let the application know what food they already have available (either through photo recognition or manual input) and get started generating recipes. Once this is done, the application will generate recipes based on all the given information and allow the user to give feedback and save recipes. The application will also offer a premium plan, in which the user has access to more detailed and extensive meal plans for the week, notifications and closer integrations into the daily routine.
We hope to add value to user’s daily lives by offering the best solutions to their diverse needs and lessening the struggle of managing their goal implementations.
References:
RIVM. (2024, November 3). Obesity rate tripled over past 40 years. https://tinylink.net/Zkr3V
Lieshout, L., & Knüppe, J. (2024, July). Consumer Food Waste. Consumer food waste Fact sheet. https://tinylink.net/HWifA
