Ingredient Substitute Recommendation Based on Collaborative Filtering and Recipe Context for Automatic Allergy-Safe Recipe Generation

Recipe sharing websites have become even more popular in the past few decades, and such repositories are able to keep hundreds of thousands of cooking recipes at the same time. Many recipe websites are developed with the participation of their community of users, which are allowed to upload new recipes and to provide evaluations and comments on the available recipes. However, in such repositories, the amount of recipes that are safe for users with special needs, such as food restrictions or allergies, is much smaller than ordinary food recipes, what may restrict the access and usability provided by such websites to that public. In this work, we propose a new recipe recommendation and generation system, based on a data-driven approach for single ingredient substitution, in such a way that recipes containing forbidden ingredients, according to a category of user food restrictions, are adapted by replacing such ingredients by safe ingredients. The proposed ingredient substitute recommendation system is based on a filtering process that takes into consideration the original recipe context, the relationship among sets of ingredients and the user preferences, towards the generation of recipes that are safe, and at the same time contemplate both user needs and tastes. The proposed system is evaluated by means of a qualitative analysis, showing promising results.