# Refrigerator Ramsay | Sherwin Vishesh Jathanna

> 🏆Winner of CalHacks 2024 (Google: Most useful app). Created Refrigerator Ramsay: an AI-powered kitchen assistant that reduces food waste with smart recipes an…

Source: https://www.sherwinvishesh.com/project/refrigerator-ramsay  
Copyright 2026 Sherwin Vishesh Jathanna. Text may be quoted with attribution. The design and source code are not licensed for reuse.

🏆Winner of CalHacks 2024 (Google: Most useful app). Created Refrigerator Ramsay: an AI-powered kitchen assistant that reduces food waste with smart recipes and real-time interaction. It reduced food wastage by 47% through interactive image-to-text and voice-to-voice chatbot.

Everyone knows the feeling: you open the fridge, find a forgotten bag of vegetables gone soft, and drop it in the bin. **Refrigerator Ramsay** was built to end that small, daily waste. It is an *AI-powered kitchen assistant* that looks at what you already have and turns it into something worth cooking. Snap a photo of your fridge or pantry and it works out your ingredients, then hands you recipes built around them, so nothing spoils and you skip the last-minute grocery run. It won the **Most Useful App award from Google at CalHacks 2024**, and the part I am proudest of is that I built the entire thing *solo*, at what is the world's largest collegiate hackathon.

### Snap your fridge, get dinner

The recognition runs on **Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash**. You take a picture, Gemini identifies the ingredients sitting in front of it, and then uses that same understanding to *invent creative recipes* from whatever combination you happen to have. There is no shopping list to type out and no hunting for a recipe that fits, the app starts from your actual fridge and works outward. That is the sustainability idea in a nutshell: use what you already own before it goes bad.

### Cooking with Gordon Ramsay, sort of

What makes it genuinely fun is the voice. Using **Hume EVI**, an *emotionally intelligent* voice AI, I recreated a version of Gordon Ramsay's witty, larger-than-life personality, which is exactly where the name comes from. Instead of reading static steps off a screen, you *talk to it* in real time, voice to voice. Ask for a substitution, a technique, or a tweak to a recipe, and it answers in character, picking up on your tone and responding like a funny, slightly cheeky kitchen companion rather than a manual. It makes cooking feel less like following instructions and more like *cooking alongside a friend*.

### The hard parts

Two challenges defined the build. The first was **Hume EVI**, which I was using for the very first time. Making a voice assistant that is *smart* is one thing; making it feel natural and engaging is another, and it took real trial and error to balance delivering useful cooking information against keeping the banter fun. The second was getting **Gemini** to reliably recognize ingredients in the messy reality of a real fridge, where items are stacked, grouped together, wrapped in all kinds of packaging, and lit however the kitchen happens to be lit. Tightening that accuracy until the ingredient detection could actually be trusted took a lot of careful iteration.

In testing, the app cut food waste by **47%**, which is the number that matters most: real ingredients saved, real money kept, and a bit of fun added to the kitchen along the way. Winning it solo, and getting encouraging feedback from judges like Google's Paige Bailey, made it one of the most rewarding things I have built.

## At a glance

- **Timeline:** Oct 2024
- **Type:** Hackathon Project
- **Event:** CalHacks 2024
- **Award:** Winner - Google: Most useful app

## Technologies

- Python
- Flask
- Google Gemini 1.5 Flash
- Hume EVI (Voice-to-Voice AI)
- React.js
- Computer Vision (Image Recognition)
- Image-to-Text Processing
- Voice Interaction & NLP

## Categories

- Web App
- AI/ML
- Hackathon Submission
- Sustainability

## Photos

- Behind the glowing CalHacks marquee on the rooftop, with the San Francisco skyline lit up at night
- My CalHacks 11.0 hacker badge, the event run with support from Google and Fetch.ai
- The winners on the big screen: Refrigerator Ramsay took Most Useful, alongside Guardian Angel and Storyscape
- The Devpost email confirming Refrigerator Ramsay won Google's Most Useful App at Cal Hacks 11.0

## Links

- [Devpost](https://devpost.com/software/refrigerator-ramsay)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/sherwinvishesh/Refrigerator-Ramsay)
- [LinkedIn Post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7256781538166530049/)
- [Demo video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNv-EJtd40s)