A 17-year-old in Virginia introduced a free AI website to help households cut food waste, cope with high grocery bills, and address hunger.
Called Grocery Genius, the platform suggests recipes, organizes meal plans, creates shopping lists, and sends donation reminders based on the ingredients people already have at home.
What happened?
According to People, student Smit Kothari launched Grocery Genius on Wednesday.
After signing up at no cost, users can log the foods in their pantry or refrigerator, including the amount of each item and its expiration date.
Using that inventory, the site creates three recipe suggestions, notes difficulty levels, and adjusts for dietary restrictions. Kothari told the magazine it "tracks what you have sitting in your pantry."
When a suggested recipe calls for an ingredient the user does not have, the site can automatically add it to a shopping list. "It's all done with a click of a button," Kothari said, according to People.
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The website also has a meal planner that shows nutrition details such as how many calories or grams of protein are included. Other tools compare Amazon and Walmart prices and warn users when food is nearing expiration so it can be donated rather than thrown away.
Why does it matter?
The launch comes as grocery shopping has been stressful for many families. High food prices can make it especially costly to buy duplicates, lose track of what is already in the kitchen, or let food go bad.
Grocery Genius is meant to limit waste and make grocery dollars go further. It helps people use ingredients they already have, organize meals ahead of time, and find low-cost options for anything missing.
"I wanted my app to have the biggest impact it could. I saw that food waste and … hunger are really connected, so I thought that I could solve both of those with one feature," Kothari said, according to People.
By encouraging users to donate food before it expires, the platform also records how many meals were given away and how much carbon dioxide was avoided through those donations.
What's being done?
Kothari told People he began developing the site about a year ago as part of his Congressional App Challenge entry, in which Grocery Genius finished in second place.
In the project's early phase, he worked on it for one to two hours each day and relied on an artificial intelligence agent for coding help, which made development "10 times faster."
Christopher Tan, head of the Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia and the Eastern Shore and one of Kothari's mentors, told 13News Now that Grocery Genius "has so many different applications that could help any number of families in need and any number of families who obviously also give to us," per People.
Kothari said the site went from about 20 users to more than 110 within a day of launching.
"It's good to see that it's helping more and more people," Kothari said. "... Overall, I don't want to stop working on this. I want to keep making it better and better while keeping it free."
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