Building a Nutritional ChatBot

Balancing a healthy and affordable diet is a challenge for many Americans who must consider multiple factors such as price, ingredients, nutritional value, and personal dietary goals when purchasing food products. This project aims to address these challenges by developing and testing a WhatsApp chatbot that provides real-time, customized grocery product recommendations based on a user's grocery list items and dietary goals. We designed the chatbot interface to interact with the user to collect information regarding dietary goals and prompt the user to enter shopping list items. We employ an optimization strategy to recommend items that minimize the total cost of the items in the list while considering dietary goals and constraints. Through the WhatsApp messaging capability, we provide specific product recommendations to the user based on inventory and dietary goals. The user is also able to message with the chatbot to explore product alternatives for any item. To refine the system, we plan to conduct interviews with local community members to validate the design and understand how our chatbot can support a users list building and shopping. Their feedback will help identify the strengths and weaknesses of the WhatsApp chatbot, guiding necessary improvements.