Aro — Personalized Food Intelligence Platform

Aro

— Personalized Food Intelligence Platform

Aro helps users make safer grocery decisions by evaluating food products against their unique allergies, diet, sensitivities, health goals, and behavioral patterns.

Live app

⏱ Built in 24 hours

🏆 Top 3 Finalist — VillageHacks 2026

👥 600+ Participants

🎯 Pitch a Startup Track

At a Glance

Problem

Grocery decisions are overloaded with ingredient complexity, generic nutrition scores, and one-size-fits-all recommendations. Users with allergies, sensitivities, diet goals, or health constraints often make decisions without understanding how a product actually fits their body and behavior.

Solution

The system explains why, scores the product fit, and recommends better alternatives.

A progressive web application that lets users search, scan, speak, or OCR a product label, then returns a personalized verdict:

Safe

Caution

Avoid

My Role

Founding team member — product design, UX strategy, system logic, interaction flow, and pitch execution.

Built In

24h

VillageHacks 2026

Outcome

Top 3

Finalist in the Pitch a Startup track, competing against 600+ participants.

Technical Product System

Aro was designed as a decision-support system, not a chatbot. It uses a knowledge graph architecture to model food products, ingredients, allergens, dietary restrictions, aliases, and product similarity. User context is stored as persistent memory across allergies, diet type, sensitivities, disliked ingredients, scan history, purchase actions, and health score trends.

Decision Engine

The decision engine follows a deterministic pipeline:

Input

Entity Resolution

Knowledge Graph + User Memory

Safety Engine

Personalized Verdict

Pipeline

Scoring Model

The scoring model combines three layers to produce the final Aro Score:

01

Product Quality Score

Ingredient-first scoring based on ingredient quality and ingredient position. Sugar listed as the first ingredient carries a heavier penalty than sugar listed near the end.

02

Personal Alignment Score

User-specific overlays for allergies, sensitivities, diet conflicts, ingredient dislikes, and health goals.

03

Behavioral Consistency Score

A memory layer that learns from what users scan, avoid, buy, and repeatedly choose.

This produces the final Aro Score — a personalized food-fit score that works like a decision layer for everyday eating.

Key Design Decision

We intentionally separated AI from safety decisions.

AI is used only for input preprocessing — speech-to-text and OCR. The actual food safety verdict is generated through a deterministic rules engine that traverses the structured knowledge graph. This reduces hallucination risk and makes the system more explainable, auditable, and trustworthy.

❌ AI for verdicts

Prone to hallucination. Verdicts can't be audited. Users lose trust if the system is wrong about an allergen.

✅ Deterministic rules engine

Same input always gives same output. Traceable through the knowledge graph. Explainable, auditable, and trustworthy.

Product Features

Multimodal Search

Users can search by text, voice, barcode, or label OCR.

Personalized Verdicts

Every product receives a Safe, Caution, or Avoid verdict based on the user's profile.

Explainable Scoring

The app explains why a product does or does not fit the user.

Alternative Recommendations

When a product is not a good fit, Aro suggests better alternatives in the same category.

Food Memory

User actions feed back into scan history, purchase behavior, and health score trends.

Tech Stack

Frontend

Next.js, TypeScript

Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui

Framer Motion

TanStack Query, Zustand

Tesseract.js

Web Speech API

BarcodeDetector API

Backend

NestJS, TypeScript

Prisma ORM

PostgreSQL, pg_trgm

Zod

Swagger / OpenAPI

Infrastructure

AWS ECS Fargate

CloudFront, S3

RDS PostgreSQL

Cognito

ECR, CodeBuild, CDK

Why It Matters

Aro reframes food scanning from generic product rating to personalized decision intelligence.

The product does not ask, "Is this food good?"

It asks, "Is this food right for you, right now?"

By combining structured food data, user memory, deterministic scoring, and explainable recommendations, Aro turns everyday grocery decisions into personalized, trustworthy, and actionable health decisions.

Food safety is personal.

Aro makes sure your food decisions are too.

VillageHacks 2026

Top 3 Finalist

24 hours