StockPot connects the entire cooking lifecycle in one app — recipes, meal planning, pantry tracking, and grocery lists that write themselves.
The Problem
Most cooking apps solve one piece of the puzzle: a recipe box here, a grocery list there, a meal planner somewhere else. You end up juggling three apps, manually cross-referencing what’s in your pantry against what you need, and still forgetting ingredients at the store. The data never flows between steps, so you spend more time managing food than cooking it.
The Solution
Capture any recipe in seconds
This is the hard part in every other app — getting recipes in. Paste a URL from any recipe website and StockPot auto-extracts the title, ingredients, and instructions. Point your camera at a cookbook page or your grandmother’s handwritten recipe card and a dual-engine OCR pipeline reads it in — Apple Vision on iOS, ML Kit on Android, both backed by OpenCV preprocessing for skew correction, contrast enhancement, and noise reduction. That wedding-gift cookbook, the sticky note from a coworker, a screenshot from a group chat — the barrier to building your collection is as low as it gets.
Plan your week
Drop recipes onto a weekly calendar with 4 meal slots per day. Scale servings up or down, move meals around, and see your full week at a glance. Your meal plan becomes the source of truth for everything that follows.
“What Do I Need?” writes the list
The app already knows what you’re cooking this week and what’s in your pantry. It compares the two — factoring in quantities and unit conversions — and tells you exactly what to buy. No more forgotten ingredients, no more buying duplicates of what’s already in your cabinet. One tap sends everything to your grocery list.
Shop and pantry updates itself
Check off items at the store and they flow back into your pantry with the right quantities. Cook a recipe and StockPot deducts what you used. Your pantry stays current without manual tracking — it’s always ready for next week’s “What Do I Need?”
The whole household, in sync
One person plans meals while the other goes shopping — everyone sees the same pantry, recipes, and grocery list in real-time. Invite codes make setup instant. Works offline too: changes queue locally and sync when you reconnect.
Technical Decisions
Frontend
Backend
OCR Pipeline
Platform
Testing
Offline-first with SQLite + Supabase sync
Users cook without reliable WiFi. Local SQLite means zero-latency reads and writes. Supabase handles cross-device sync when connectivity returns. Trade-off: dual schema maintenance + conflict resolution complexity.
React Native + Expo over Flutter
React ecosystem familiarity, Expo’s managed workflow for OTA updates, and React Query for cache management. Trade-off: bridge overhead vs native performance (acceptable for a CRUD app).
ML Kit OCR for recipe capture
On-device OCR via ML Kit means recipe cards and cookbook pages can be scanned without sending images to a server. Privacy-first, works offline, and fast enough for real-time capture.
Custom sync engine with conflict resolution
Households need real-time sync — one person plans meals while another shops. A custom sync engine with last-write-wins per field and queue-based offline support ensures consistency without data loss.
Results
Try StockPot
StockPot is in active development. Visit the landing page to learn more and sign up for early access.