Bento
Overview
Bento is a cross-platform meal planning app for web and Android, built with React Native on Expo. It brings a household's food loop into one place: plan meals on a calendar, track macros against goals, find and import recipes, keep a live pantry, and generate grocery lists from what's planned minus what's on hand.
Led most development and design decisions end to end — product direction, data model, UI system, and the integration architecture.
Approach
- Meal calendar as the core object: everything else (macros, grocery lists, pantry deductions) derives from what's planned.
- Offline-first data with Supabase and PowerSync, so the app stays usable in a store with no signal and syncs when it reconnects.
- Recipe search and import via Spoonacular, nutrition data via FatSecret, schedule sync through the Google Calendar API.
- AI-generated grocery lists built from planned meals cross-referenced against current pantry contents, with edge functions handling approval workflows.
Challenges
Reconciling offline edits against the synced source of truth without losing user changes.
Normalizing nutrition data across two external APIs with different food taxonomies.
Keeping a single React Native codebase honest on both web and Android layouts.
Outcome
A working product deployed on Expo, exercised as a daily-use tool — and the deepest single codebase I've owned across product, data, and integrations.