pamangan.com
LiveAI-powered Filipino recipe platform
Tech Stack
Overview
pamangan.com is a full-stack AI-powered recipe platform celebrating Filipino cuisine and global flavors. Users can discover recipes, generate new ones via AI, build grocery lists from multiple recipes, get per-serving nutrition estimates, and plan meals for the week. The platform uses a database-first search strategy to minimise unnecessary API calls.
Key Features
- AI recipe generation using Gemini 1.5 Flash (primary) and Groq llama-3.3-70b (fallback)
- Database-first search — MongoDB text index checked before any AI API call
- AI grocery list generation from multiple selected recipes
- AI nutritional breakdown per serving with macro estimates
- Cultural and historical background for any dish
- Weekly meal planner saved to localStorage
- Admin dashboard with JWT authentication and recipe CRUD
- Pexels image integration and ImgBB upload for recipe photos
Challenge
Coordinating two AI providers with silent fallback so users never see an error. Also ensuring the database-first search was fast enough to avoid unnecessary API calls on every keystroke.
Solution
Built a service layer that tries Gemini, catches any failure silently, and immediately retries with Groq. MongoDB text indexes on recipe name, cuisine, and tags made DB lookups fast enough to always run first.
Lessons Learned
AI reliability is not guaranteed — always design for graceful fallback. MongoDB text indexes are powerful but require careful field selection. Separating AI logic into a service class makes it trivially swappable.