FridgeRAG: Smart Fridge & Recipe Assistant

People waste 20–30 minutes daily deciding what to cook and lose track of what's in their fridge, resulting in roughly $1,800 per household per year in food waste. Grocery receipts contain the perfect ingredient list — but they're thrown away the moment you get home.

A Discord bot you photograph your grocery receipt to. It reads the receipt with vision AI, builds your live fridge inventory automatically, and when you type /cook it instantly suggests 3 personalized recipes using your exact ingredients — prioritizing whatever expires soonest. Every morning it proactively alerts you before anything spoils.

• Snap a photo of your grocery receipt and send it to the Discord bot
• Gemini Vision extracts items, quantities, and expiry estimates as JSON
• Inventory updates automatically
• Type /cook to get 3 recipes ranked by what's expiring soonest
• Receive proactive expiry alerts each morning

• Vision extraction — Gemini Vision reads messy receipt photos and produces structured JSON (items, quantities, expiry estimates)
• Retrieval-augmented generation — fridge state is embedded and used to semantically search 2M+ recipes in Pinecone, with metadata filtering, query expansion, reranking, and expiry-based temporal weighting
• Conversational synthesis — Gemini 2.5 Flash turns retrieved recipes into a natural reply, including substitutions for missing ingredients

• LLM: Gemini API (Vision, Flash, Embeddings)
• Vector DB: Pinecone
• Database: MongoDB Atlas
• Bot: Discord Bot API
• Backend: FastAPI
• Reranker: Cohere Rerank
• Recipe data: RecipeNLG dataset
• Hosting: Vercel
• Vibe coding: GitHub Copilot, Claude / Cursor