ShelfLife-KIMS

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built ShelfLife-KIMS, a smart kitchen management system that helps a household decide what to cook based on the people in the house, their food restrictions and preferences, and the ingredients they already have.

The main things I built are:

• Household management — create a household and add different members.
• Food profiles — store allergies, dietary restrictions, dislikes, preferred foods, spice level, texture, and cuisine preferences.
• Inventory management — add ingredients, track quantities and expiry dates, edit or delete items, and record when food is consumed.
• Food usage history — keep track of what ingredients were used and when.
• Persistent storage — household and inventory data is stored using MongoDB Atlas, so it is not lost when the application reloads.
• Web application — built a usable React frontend connected to a FastAPI backend.
• Validation and safety — hard dietary restrictions are kept separate from soft preferences so important constraints are not treated like normal preferences.

The main idea behind ShelfLife-KIMS is: instead of just giving recipes, it understands the kitchen and the people in it.

Demo Video

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m_gRI1GH9fyvkmLPbaghpoIYfXSmg-RU/view?usp=sharing

Deployed Link

https://shelflife-9tls.onrender.com/

Code

https://github.com/Ravindar-Amogh-Gummadavelly/ShelfLife-KIMS.git

How I Built It

I built ShelfLife-KIMS as a full-stack web application using React + TypeScript for the frontend and FastAPI + Python for the backend.

For the data layer, I used MongoDB Atlas to store household members, food profiles, inventory, and usage history.

For AI, the planned architecture is built around open-weight Gemma models with Mastra as the agent orchestration layer. The idea is that the AI acts as a kitchen brain that understands the household's constraints, preferences, and available ingredients instead of simply generating random recipes.

I also designed the system so that AI suggestions do not directly override important food restrictions. Hard constraints such as allergies and prohibited foods are handled deterministically by the application, while softer preferences can be used by the AI for ranking and recommendations.

The current deployed foundation focuses on making the household, food profiles, inventory, and persistence work reliably first, with the AI architecture designed to build on top of that foundation.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation mattered because ShelfLife-KIMS was built to solve a real household problem by combining ideas, technologies, and data sources that would not be practical to build from scratch.

Using open APIs and tools made it possible to connect ShelfLife’s existing household and food data with intelligent recommendations, validation, and automation. A closed API would have limited us to whatever functionality one provider offered. Open innovation instead let us combine different capabilities and adapt them around the needs of the household.

Most importantly, it allowed us to build a more flexible product quickly—focusing our effort on the ShelfLife-KIMS experience and the problem we wanted to solve rather than reinventing infrastructure that already existed.

My Agent Session

Optional — no DevRelay agent session was saved for this project.

Prize Categories

Featured Categories

• Best Use of Render

Partner Categories

• Best Use of GitHub Copilot — if applicable based on the project's actual development history.
• Best Use of MongoDB Atlas — if applicable based on the project's actual data layer.
• Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing — if applicable based on the deployed implementation.

Solo submission — no teammates to credit.

ShelfLife-KIMS started with a simple idea: food should be easier to manage before it becomes waste. We built it to bring household inventory, member preferences, and intelligent decision-making into one practical experience.

This project is more than a prototype—it is a foundation for a smarter, more sustainable way for households to manage the food they already have. By combining open innovation with a focused product experience, ShelfLife-KIMS turns everyday food management into something more predictable, personalized, and useful.

We built ShelfLife-KIMS with the belief that reducing food waste doesn't always require buying less—it can start with making better use of what we already have.