EatWise AI: An Open-Source AI Nutrition Companion for Smarter, Healthier Eating

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle

EatWise AI is an AI-powered nutrition and wellness tracker that helps people make smarter, data-driven decisions about their daily food habits.

Many people want to eat healthier but struggle to track calories, understand macronutrients, plan meals, or determine whether their daily eating habits align with their wellness goals. EatWise AI brings these tasks together in one platform.

The goal is to make nutrition tracking more accessible, understandable, and practical for everyday users.

Who is it for? Students, fitness enthusiasts, busy professionals, and anyone who wants to develop healthier eating habits. It could also serve as a foundation for nutrition-focused wellness products and services.

The project supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being.

🚀 Try EatWise AI: https://eat-wise-ai-rho.vercel.app

Explore the application and try its nutrition tracking, meal analysis, recipe suggestions, and wellness features.

💻 GitHub Repository: Shriraj888/EatWise-AI

The project is open source under the MIT License.

Feel free to explore the code, report issues, suggest improvements, or contribute new features.

I built EatWise AI as a React-based web application with a modular architecture for the interface, state management, nutritional calculations, and AI integrations.

The application integrates AI into practical nutrition workflows rather than using it only as a chatbot.

The application supports both Google Gemini and OpenRouter. Its AI provider service tries Gemini first when configured and can fall back to OpenRouter if Gemini fails and an OpenRouter key is available.

For nutrition goals, the application uses the Mifflin–St Jeor equation to estimate basal metabolic rate and calculates daily energy targets based on activity level and user goals. These calculations complement, rather than replace, the AI-generated insights.

I wanted the application to be modular and practical to extend. AI integrations, food search, reusable components, nutritional calculations, and global application state are separated into dedicated parts of the codebase.

The current implementation stores application state in the browser using Zustand persistence. It does not currently provide full authentication, user accounts, or server-side cloud synchronization.

AI-generated nutritional values are estimates and are not medical advice.

Nutrition and wellness tools should not have to be limited to expensive, proprietary platforms.

Open innovation makes it possible for developers to experiment with different AI providers, inspect implementations, learn from existing projects, and adapt tools to their own communities.

For EatWise AI, an open-source frontend combined with support for multiple AI providers makes experimentation more flexible. Gemini and OpenRouter provide alternative ways to power AI features, while Open Food Facts supplies a public source of food product information.

Open innovation also allows other developers to improve the project by contributing better nutritional calculations, additional food data integrations, improved prompts, accessibility enhancements, and more robust AI output validation.

A closed API would not automatically prevent these possibilities, but an open codebase lets contributors inspect and modify the application's implementation rather than depending entirely on a vendor-controlled product.

My vision is to keep building EatWise AI as an approachable, extensible starting point for AI-powered nutrition and wellness applications.

I don't have a shareable DevRelay agent session to include in this submission yet.

The source code and implementation are available in the EatWise AI GitHub repository.

Challenge: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 2: Side Hustle.

Additional partner prize categories are not listed here because I haven't verified which ones the project qualifies for. Update this section with the applicable categories from the challenge page before publishing.

Built to make healthier food decisions easier through AI and open source.