GrocerEase: A Mobile Application for Recipe-based Grocery List Generation and Quantity Optimization
Keywords:
Meal Planning, Grocery Management, Pantry Tracking, Smart Scanning, Budget Monitoring, Mobile ApplicationAbstract
GrocerEase is a mobile application created to address common challenges faced by individuals when managing meals, grocery shopping, pantry inventory, and food-related expenses. These challenges have become increasingly complex for individuals with busy lifestyles, particularly students and young adults. Existing mobile applications often address these tasks separately, resulting in fragmented experiences, repeated manual input, and limited integration between meal planning, grocery lists, and pantry tracking. This paper presents GrocerEase, a smart mobile application designed to integrate meal planning, grocery list management, pantry monitoring, and budget tracking within a single platform. A review of related applications, including Mealime, AnyList, Eat This Much, and MealBoard reveals that while they provide useful individual features, they lack comprehensive integration, intelligent scanning capabilities, and strong budget awareness. These gaps were further supported by findings from distributing a questionnaire survey, which highlighted the demand for automated grocery list generation, pantry expiry alerts, customizable recipes, and reduced manual data entry. Guided by these findings, the project adopts a structured system development methodology involving requirement analysis, system modelling, and prototype design. Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagrams, such as use case, activity, sequence, and data flow diagrams, were developed to represent system functionality, workflows, and data movement. A high-fidelity prototype was then created to demonstrate key features, including weekly and monthly meal planning, smart scanning for food and recipes, automatic grocery list generation, pantry tracking, and budget monitoring. GrocerEase apps aims to improve user efficiency, reduce food waste, and support informed decision-making through an integrated and user-centred mobile application design.
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