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
the idea is 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.
the app is built in swiftui with swiftdata for storage and icloud sync. 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 and icloud sync
- building a cuisine-matching system so protein, veg, and carb combinations actually make sense together
- adding user preferences like vegan mode and ingredient exclusion without overcomplicating the ui
- shipping a second app to the app store, this time with more confidence in the process
what’s next
there’s a lot i’d like to add, like nutritional info, weekly meal planning, and a shopping list. for now it does the core thing well: getting me out of my meal rut.