varied veggie
an ios app that helps you break out of your meal rut by tracking what you cook and suggesting new ingredients.
varied veggie is a meal planning app that helps you eat a wider variety of food. i built it because i kept cooking the same few meals on repeat and wanted something to nudge me towards ingredients i hadn’t used in a while.
what i built
you pick a protein, a vegetable, and a carb, and the app suggests cuisine-matched recipes for that combo. ingredients you haven’t cooked recently get pushed to the top of the list, so you’re always trying something new. there’s also a “surprise me” button that picks a random cuisine-aware meal when you can’t decide.
since launch, i’ve added a bunch of new features:
- meal planner - plan your meals for the week with breakfast, lunch, and dinner slots, and auto-generate a shopping list from your plan
- insights dashboard - a variety score that tracks what percentage of available ingredients you’ve eaten this month, plus cuisine breakdowns, neglected ingredients, and streaks
- recipe import - save your own recipes alongside the built-in suggestions
- meal history - log meals with photos, ratings, and prep methods, with search and favourites filtering
- apple health integration - optionally log meals to apple health
- vegan mode - toggle to filter for plant-based proteins only
the app is built in swiftui with swiftdata for local storage. everything stays on-device, no backend needed.
what i learnt
- designing a sorting algorithm that deprioritises recently used ingredients to encourage variety
- working with swiftdata for local persistence
- building a cuisine-matching system so protein, veg, and carb combinations actually make sense together
- integrating with healthkit and handling opt-in permissions gracefully
- building a weekly planner ui with drag-and-drop meal slots
- shipping and iterating on a live app store app