Virginia Teen Creates Website That Automatically Turns Pantry Inventory into Recipes and Donation Alerts (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Virginia student Smit Kothari, 17, created Grocery Genius, a free website that uses AI to reduce food waste and combat hunger

• The platform generates recipes, shopping lists, and meal plans while tracking pantry inventory and expiration dates

• It also encourages food donations by alerting users to expiring items and tracking the environmental impact of donations

At just 17 years old, Smit Kothari is taking on food waste — and your ever-increasing grocery budget.

On Wednesday, July 8, the Virginia high schooler launched Grocery Genius , a website that uses AI to take inventory of pantries and turn it into recipes or donations. 

Kothari tells PEOPLE that the new free resource boasts multiple functions, from AI recipe generation based on your pantry's inventory to meal and shopping planning.

Users can sign up for free on the website with their email, then enter the items in their fridge and pantry, along with their quantities and expiration dates, to get access to Grocery Genius' features. Kothari adds that the website has a "smart expiration date feature" that allows users to rely on the website to calculate expiration dates if they don't want to enter each product's use-by date.

Per Kothari, the website "tracks what you have sitting in your pantry." Then, he says, users can create recipes automatically in the recipes tab.

"It adds everything in your pantry and generates three recipes based on what you have," he says, adding that the recipes include "dietary restrictions" and the difficulty level of the recipe.

"It could add extra items, like you might not have something in your pantry, and it'll give you a recipe where you need to order something from the grocery store," Kothari adds. "In that case, you can generate a shopping list."

"It's all done with a click of a button," he says. "If I click generate shopping list, it'll add everything to my shopping list that I need for the recipes."

He says that the website also has a meal planner, where you can input the generated recipes into a calendar that tracks nutrition facts like calories and protein. You can also generate a shopping list for the week with this feature, he says.

Another aspect of the website is a comparison of prices between two of the country's largest grocery retailers — Amazon and Walmart. 

"It tells you which one is cheaper, and it helps you save money," Kothari says.

Finally, the donate tab alerts users to food items that are expiring soon.

"It pushes users to donate what they have," he says, adding that it "helps people donate the foods that might be expiring soon and give to the people who might need it."

This tab also tracks the number of meals donated to those in need, along with the amount of carbon dioxide emissions those donations prevented.

Kothari's motivation for the app comes from a desire to address multiple issues at once.

"I wanted my app to have the biggest impact it could," Kothari says. "I saw that food waste and...hunger are really connected, so I thought that I could solve both of those with one feature."

Christopher Tan, the CEO of the Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia and the Eastern Shore who mentored Kothari, told 13News Now about the app's potential impact.

"It 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," Tan told the outlet.

Tan told the outlet he was impressed with Kothari's dedication to the platform.

"A lot of people approach us with ideas, but Smit was really engaged from the very beginning," Tan said. "You could tell what he wanted to do was create something our neighbors could use and something people who donate to us could use."

He added that the app would also be helpful for him to remember what's in his pantry before it's wasted.

Kothari says he began the process of creating the website about a year ago when applying for the Congressional App Challenge, a national computer science prize, in which he won second for the site.

He shares that in his first five months of working on the app, he would spend one to two hours a day on it. He says he's been using an AI agent to help code the platform, which has made it "10 times faster" and has minimized costs because he hasn't spent much money learning how to build and host the app.

He says that since launching the website, his friends have been texting him about it, and the usage has "risen significantly" from about 20 to over 110 users in about a day.

"It's good to see that it's helping more and more people," he says.

Moving forward, Kothari says, he hopes to "keep improving" the platform.

"There are some bugs and maybe I could improve some of the features," he says. "Overall, I don't wanna stop working on this. I wanna keep making it better and better, while keeping it free."

Read the original article on People