Tex's Kitchen App
A private household app that solves a genuinely annoying problem.
A private, password-protected household application. No screenshots or data are published, because everything behind the sign-in is personal.
What this had to solve.
Plan the week's meals, turn that plan into a grocery list automatically, and stop buying a fourth jar of something already sitting in the pantry. Two people, two phones, one shared state that has to stay in sync without anyone thinking about it.
What was built
- A weekly meal planner where a meal is assigned to a day by tapping it
- A reusable meal library where each meal stores its own ingredient lines
- Automatic grocery list generation that pulls ingredients from every planned meal and merges duplicates
- Pantry tracking with running low and stocked states, which dims items already on hand
- A shopping mode designed for use while actually walking a store
- Receipt scanning that flags lines it could not read confidently instead of guessing
- Multi-user accounts with a 30 day session on a trusted phone
- Type
- Web application
- Access
- Private
- Design
- Mobile first
- Stack
- Node and Express
Technology
- Node.js
- Express
- Mobile-first web application
- Multi-user authentication
- Receipt scanning
Verified from the live site where publicly detectable.
The parts that do the work.
Plan once, shop automatically
Planning a meal drops its ingredients straight onto the grocery list, merged and deduplicated.
Pantry awareness
The list dims what is already on hand, so the plan accounts for the shelf.
Shopping mode
A dedicated in-store view rather than a desktop layout squeezed onto a phone.
Receipt capture with honesty
Lines the scan could not read are highlighted for review instead of silently entered wrong.
Shared household state
Two accounts, one synchronized plan, list, and pantry.
Why it matters for your project.
Different business, same underlying capability.
- Mobile-first application design where the phone is the primary device, not an afterthought
- Multi-user shared state and synchronization
- Authentication and session handling
- Image capture and data extraction in a real workflow
- Designing a tool around a habit rather than around a feature list
Services involved
Tell me what you are trying to build.
Describe it however makes sense to you. Working out what it is called and how it gets built is my job, not yours.