Healthy Meal Visualizer with Gemini AI Studio: Recipes, Nutrition & Food Photos

This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio.

What I Built

I built Healthy Meal Visualizer & Nutrition Tracker. The app lets you input a set of food ingredients (or select from suggestions), then Gemini creates a balanced recipe + full nutritional breakdown (calories, macros, etc.), and Imagen generates a photorealistic image of how the meal might look when plated.

Key prompts:

• Using [ingredients list], create a healthy recipe under [target calories], with macros and portion sizes.
• Generate a fresh, appetizing food photo of the dish using those ingredients, in natural lighting.

Demo

• Demo app →
• Github →

My Experience

• Learned how to adjust prompts for Imagen to get realistic food plating & lighting, and avoid weird artifacts.
• Found that nutrition data alignment (ingredient names, portion sizes) needed careful handling to avoid wrong macro calculations.
• Surprised by how well the image looked once I tuned the prompt. But also saw that sometimes image generation makes the meal look more perfect than likely in reality.
• If I did this again, I’d try integrating image recognition for user-uploaded photos, and personalize suggestions for dietary restrictions.