Simplex Nutrition Optimizer — Solo-Founded Web App

The Problem

Eating a nutritionally complete diet requires hitting dozens of targets at once — vitamins, minerals, macros — while keeping cost down. Doing that by hand is effectively an optimization problem with 30+ simultaneous constraints. I built food-algorithm.de to solve it automatically.

How It Works

1. Personal Information — the user enters sex, age, weight, and activity level (1.2–1.8), plus lifestyle factors like smoking, which shift daily requirements.
2. Nutrient Requirements — from that input, the app computes personalized min/max targets across 30+ nutrients (vitamins, minerals, macros — e.g. Niacin, Magnesium, Calcium, Sodium, Potassium, Iron, Iodine, Selenium), each individually editable before optimizing.
3. Optimization — the Simplex linear programming algorithm searches the space of available foods for the minimum-cost combination that satisfies every constraint simultaneously.

Results & Interaction

The result shows exactly which foods were selected and how much of each nutrient target they cover — for example, a serving of raw broccoli might supply 37% of the Vitamin C requirement, 17% of Beta-Carotene, and 13% of Folate. Users can remove any ingredient they don't want (allergy, dislike, availability) and instantly recompute the optimal diet around the remaining foods.

Technical Implementation

• Backend: Java, implementing the Simplex algorithm for linear programming
• Frontend: Angular
• Database: PostgreSQL for food and nutrient data
• Role: Solo founder — designed, built, and launched the product end to end