Kain master chef cooking app logo, as shown on app store. (Kain app)
With the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reporting millions of households in the United States lacking reliable access to food and billions of pounds of food getting tossed into landfills yearly, 20-year-old Rowan University student Elisabeth Yap decided that she had enough. Harnessing the power of Google Gemini, the electrical and computer engineering major created Kain, an app designed to limit food waste by creating recipes made from ingredients the user already has in their kitchen.
The process is simple: the user inputs or takes a photo of the ingredients they wish to use, and within seconds, Kain generates a recipe using the ingredients provided. The app can also take dietary needs and preferences into account and provide nutritional information and healthier alternatives to the ingredients given. Kain is not exclusive to seasoned chefs either, as the app recommends recipes that suit the skill level of the person cooking.
After moving into her first apartment, Rowan sophomore Victoriana Hartley found these features to be particularly helpful.
“I would buy something for a specific recipe and not know what to do with the excess I was not using,” said Hartley. “Being able to create meals using the ingredients I had tucked away or given up on is going to save me so much money.”
Yap hopes that she can help people like Hartley by helping consumers get the maximum use out of every item they purchase in the grocery store.
“Even on a budget, people need to get some food in their stomach,” said Yap.
While limiting food waste is her overarching motivator, Yap credits her community as a driving factor in her decision to create Kain. Yap views Kain as the byproduct of her parents’ influences, as Yap fell in love with cooking by watching her mother work in the kitchen and became interested in technology because her father worked in information technology for the military. Yap’s Filipino heritage also shines through in the Kain app, as the name derives from the Tagalog word for “eat.”
“Filipino culture is all about giving away food to your neighbors, especially in the villages where they don’t have the access to it or the money for it,” said Yap.
While the Kain app was designed to combat food insecurity and waste, the training and use of artificial intelligence models requires an exorbitant amount of energy.
“Fixing food insecurity is one problem I aim to fix currently, and finding a cleaner, more renewable energy source is another problem I aim to tackle in the near future,” said Yap.
Finding a renewable energy source is not the only other issue Yap is taking on, as she is also in the process of building an app to make it easier to do laundry in shared spaces. The app would host information on available machines, give alerts when cycles are complete, and even inform the user if they make a mistake using the machines. Yap also has larger plans for Kain, as she hopes to partner with prominent local brands like Wawa and ShopRite to help further mitigate the damage of food insecurity.
With the U.S. Government Accountability Office finding that “an estimated 23 percent of college students (3.8 million) experienced food insecurity in 2020,” Kain’s technology can be impactful for students at Rowan and other universities across the country. By creating easier access to recipes and making cooking more accessible for everyone, Yap is forging a path towards putting a dent in rising food insecurity issues.
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