What I Built
Idea chosen: "A fridge photo to grocery list tool, so you never have to stand there with the door open again."
SlothCart is a deliberately lazy kitchen helper. You take one photo of your open fridge and one of your pantry shelf, and that is the last bit of effort required. SlothCart looks at what's actually there, works out what's running low or missing, and hands you a ready-to-shop grocery list sorted by store aisle. It also suggests two or three meals you could make with what you already have, so the list focuses on filling gaps instead of buying duplicates.
The sloth-friendly extras:
Staples memory: Tell it once that you always want milk, eggs, and coffee on hand, and it quietly checks for them every time.
Expiry nudges: It flags things that look like they need using up soon, such as wilting greens or a nearly empty jar, and builds a meal idea around them.
One-tap output: Copy the list to your notes app, or share it with a housemate so they can do the shopping instead.
Who it's for: Busy people, students, households that keep buying a fourth jar of mustard, and anyone who dreads the "what do we need?" ritual before a grocery run.
Demo
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(Embed screenshots or a GIF here: the fridge photo upload, the detected-items review screen, and the finished aisle-sorted grocery list.)
Code
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How I Built It
Open-Source AI Framework: The core is Gemma, an open-weight vision-language model that looks at the fridge and pantry photos and returns a structured inventory: item, rough quantity, and a "low / fine / use soon" status. Because it's one open model doing both the seeing and the planning, the same Gemma instance then compares the inventory with your staples list and recipe preferences to produce the shopping list and meal ideas. A confirmation screen shows what it detected, so you can correct a mislabeled jar in one tap instead of retyping a list.
Frontend Architecture: A mobile-first progressive web app in React, built for use in the kitchen: big tap targets, photo capture straight from the camera, and a checklist view that works one-handed in the store.
Backend & Hosting: A small API deployed on Render stores your staples, household members, and shared lists, and runs the model endpoint for anyone who doesn't want to host Gemma themselves. People who prefer full control can run everything locally with the same code.
Integrations: SerpApi looks up nearby grocery stores and current local prices and availability for the items on your list, so you can see which nearby store has the best total or whether something is out of stock before you leave the house. The model handles judgment, and SerpApi handles live facts.
How it flows: (1) Snap the fridge and pantry. (2) Gemma builds the inventory and you fix any mistakes in one tap. (3) SlothCart merges that with your staples and meal ideas. (4) SerpApi suggests where to shop. (5) You walk out with a sorted list and zero time spent staring into the fridge.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Your kitchen stays yours. A fridge photo reveals more than people expect: diet, health conditions, religion, household size, even when you're away. With an open-weight model, those photos can be processed on your own machine or home server and never need to be uploaded to a company that stores them.
Set it up once and don't pay again. This is something you use constantly, every week, for years. A closed vision API charges per image forever, which is a poor fit for a tool whose whole job is to save you small amounts of effort. Running an open model means the marginal cost of each fridge scan is effectively zero.
Tuned to how people actually eat. Closed general-purpose models are good at the average kitchen. Because the weights are open, a household or community can adapt the model and prompts to their own cuisine and ingredients, whether that's regional produce, specific brands, or a particular diet, so it stops mistaking one ingredient for another.
It keeps working. Self-hosting means no surprise price hikes, no deprecated endpoint breaking the app, and the option to swap in a better model later without rebuilding anything. A lazy tool should be one you can set up once and forget about.
Prize Categories
Best Use of Gemma
Best Use of Render
Best Use of SerpApi
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