Ricetta Stone

Ricetta Stone is a meal planning iOS app created to address the unique logistical challenges of the designer while living and studying in Bergamo. The designer previously struggled with navigating recipes scattered across various apps (Apple Notes, Reminders, and Photos) and consolidating a grocery list (while accounting for metric conversions and Italian translation), making weekly meal planning and grocery shopping inefficient.

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Three main features of the app streamline weekly meal planning:

• Recipe management: The user can import, view, filter, and schedule recipes for the upcoming weeks, all in one place.
• Grocery list consolidation: The meal plan tab shows the user’s chosen recipes and enables them to export a grocery list of the aggregated ingredients for the week, with items translated into Italian and measurements converted into metric amounts.
• Integration across iOS apps: The app allows synchronization from the user’s Photos and Reminders, as well as export of groceries into a Reminders grocery list.

The designer used Claude Code to build the iOS app and a backend server to store the recipe database, leveraging the Gemini API to process recipe photos and data. As her first experience working with Claude code, the designer learned about the power and limitations of using AI to create applications, and how to craft prompts that generated the desired results, iterating to work out inevitable bugs and issues.