FuelU

Fueling Students for Success, One Bite at a Time

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Inspiration

As college students, we know how hard it is to balance academics, work, and personal health. Cooking often feels like a luxury when time, money, and energy are tight. We wanted to create a tool that helps students cook fresh, affordable meals—making home cooking more approachable and reducing reliance on expensive or unhealthy takeout.

What it does

FuelU provides students with easy-to-follow recipes from around the world, helping them build confidence in the kitchen. Users can search for meals that fit their tastes and explore new cuisines, all with the goal of fostering better eating habits and saving money. The app is designed as a first step toward a bigger vision of offering personalized meal recommendations based on dietary restrictions, prep time, and ingredients on hand.

How we built it

We built FuelU using Next.js and React for the frontend and integrated a third-party recipe API to fetch a wide range of meals. We focused on building clean, responsive UI components like the SearchBar and ImageCard to make recipe browsing intuitive. Our collaborative workflow involved version control with GitHub and rapid prototyping to bring the core features to life in a short time frame.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge was finding an API that matched all of our goals—especially one that included data for dietary restrictions, prep time, and budget-friendliness. We adapted by working with a more general recipe API and adjusted our app's focus to highlight accessible home cooking as the first step toward our wellness mission. Time constraints also made it challenging to implement every planned feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we built a working, polished prototype that’s functional and user-friendly, despite limited time and resources. We successfully integrated an external API, designed custom UI components, and kept the user experience at the center of our development.

What we learned

We learned a lot about API integration, responsive design, and effective team collaboration. We also gained insight into how to pivot and refine our goals when technical limitations arise, and how to communicate a project's long-term vision even when the first version is still in progress.

What's next for FuelU

We plan to enhance FuelU by:

  • Integrating dietary restriction and allergen filters

  • Adding tags for prep time, difficulty, and budget-friendliness

  • Creating a personalized experience where users can save favorite recipes and get recommendations

We’re excited to keep developing FuelU into a full-fledged tool that helps students stay healthy and independent.

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