EatWell

Eat Smart. Live Well

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🧠 Inspiration

Cooking is supposed to be joyful and nourishing — but in today’s world, it often feels complicated and exclusive. Recipes online can be cluttered, filled with unfamiliar ingredients, and rarely considerate of allergies, dietary restrictions, or local availability. We wanted to change that.

EatWell was inspired by the idea that healthy, accessible cooking should be for everyone. Whether someone is managing a diet, learning to cook, or simply trying to eat better, they deserve a tool that makes understanding and adapting recipes effortless.

🍽️ What it does

EatWell is a Chrome Extension that transforms any recipe page into a smart, AI-powered cooking companion. It can:

  • Summarize recipes for quick understanding.
  • Simplify complex instructions.
  • Detect allergens and estimate nutrition.
  • Localize ingredients for global accessibility.
  • Provide an interactive AI chat assistant (on-device or cloud) for tasks like scaling, substitutions, and unit conversions.

With EatWell, users can read, understand, and personalize recipes — directly in their browser.

🧩 How we built it

EatWell was built using a combination of Chrome’s built-in AI APIs and a modular JavaScript-based extension architecture.

We integrated:

  • Prompt API for ingredient cleaning, localization, allergen detection, and on-device chat.
  • Summarizer API for generating concise recipe overviews.
  • Rewriter API to simplify and clarify cooking instructions.
  • Gemini API for advanced reasoning tasks such as nutrition estimation, ingredient substitution, unit conversion, and serving rescaling.

All processing happens either on-device (for privacy) or via Gemini 2.5 Flash (for more powerful reasoning), depending on user preference. The UI was designed for seamless in-page interaction — quick, lightweight, and intuitive.

⚙️ Challenges we ran into

  • Integrating multiple AI APIs while keeping latency low and responses coherent.
  • Maintaining consistent data flow between extracted recipe elements and AI-generated outputs.
  • Ensuring local privacy controls, especially when toggling between Gemini Nano (on-device) and Gemini Flash (cloud).
  • Designing a clean, accessible UI that blends naturally with diverse recipe websites.
  • Handling messy, inconsistent recipe formats across different sources.

Each challenge pushed us to refine both our technical design and user experience.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a fully functional AI-powered extension that can understand and personalize recipes from any website.
  • Successfully integrating on-device AI (Gemini Nano) — showcasing local reasoning without relying solely on cloud processing.
  • Creating a conversational layer that replaces rigid interfaces with natural, flexible user interaction.
  • Making cooking more inclusive, helping users with allergies, dietary preferences, and ingredient availability challenges.

💡 What we learned

  • How to effectively combine multiple Chrome AI APIs for complementary functionality.
  • The importance of contextual prompt design when working with multi-step reasoning tasks.
  • The trade-offs between on-device performance and cloud model capability.
  • That accessibility and personalization are just as important as technical accuracy when building real-world AI tools.

🚀 What's next for EatWell

We plan to extend EatWell into a personalized dietary companion by:

  • Enabling user profiles for dietary goals, allergies, and ingredient preferences.
  • Adding automatic meal planning based on nutritional needs.
  • Improving multilingual support for global accessibility.
  • Expanding the chat assistant to support voice interaction and real-time cooking guidance.
  • Creating more accurate nutrition analysis by creating our own USDA based MCP Server.

Our vision is to make EatWell not just a browser extension — but a trusted partner for anyone who wants to cook smarter, eat healthier, and live better.

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