client work at .monks · ai recipe tool

Bimi® Leftover Booster

leftovers incuisinetimeoccasionrecipe outAI photography

In the Netherlands, the average household wastes around 34 kilos of food a year. For the Week Against Waste, Bimi® and the Gardeners agency wanted a tool that helped people use the ingredients that usually end up in the bin. The project came to .monks, where I work as Sr. Creative Technologist. One simple rule: whatever you've got, you can boost it with Bimi®.

client

Bimi®

creative agency

Gardeners (NL)

built at

.monks — my day job

status

live at bimibroccoli.nl

stack

Gemini · Vertex AI · Cloud Run · Firestore

The generated result: Rijst tuin met Bimi, a kid-friendly plate photographed top-down with hands reaching in

34kilos of food the average Dutch household wastes a year

4occasions, each with its own art direction

1rule: every recipe is finished with one Bimi® boost

13minutes from my test leftovers to a kid-approved dish

01 / the brief

Better than another boring recipe generator

Gardeners' starting point was blunt: influencers and journalists aren't waiting for another recipe generator — there are plenty. They're looking for something worth talking about: an experience that feels considered, surprising and genuinely useful. And the brief already looked past launch: the tool had to be modular and theme-flexible, ready to come back for Easter, Christmas, Keti Koti or Eid al-Fitr with different photography, colours and seasonal recipes.

02 / the experience

From the fridge to the plate, in five steps

Tag your leftovers

"What do you have at home?" — you type what's left and it becomes tags. Rice and carrot, in my test run.

Pick a cuisine

Italian, Asian, Mexican, French, Dutch, Mediterranean — or "surprise me".

Say how much time you've got

A slider from 10 to 120 minutes. The recipe fits your evening, not the other way around.

Who's at the table?

Picky kids, someone to impress, family dinner or healthy — each occasion changes the plate, the props and the art direction of the photo.

Get your masterpiece

Gemini writes the recipe — always finished with Bimi® — and plates it in AI-generated food photography, every image labelled "gegenereerd met AI".

The Leftover Booster landing with a feed of AI-generated dishes — The landing: long live leftovers, with a feed of generated dishes.

Ingredient tagging with rice and carrot added — Step 01 · rice and carrot tagged, off to the kitchen.

Cuisine selector with Italian, Asian, Mexican, French, Dutch and Mediterranean options — Step 02 · what are you in the mood for?

Time slider from 10 to 120 minutes — Step 03 · from 10 to 120 minutes.

Occasion carousel showing the picky kids plate — Step 04 · who's at the table? — picky kids.

Loading screen: a dancing Bimi stem while something tasty is in the making — The loader: a dancing Bimi stem while "something tasty is in the making".

03 / art direction

Four occasions, four aesthetics

The photography follows one fixed rule: top-down with a slight tilt, hands always present, the dish always the hero — the shot people naturally take and post. What shifts per occasion is everything else: plate, cutlery, surface, linen and props move together to tell that moment's story.

🧪

The Curious Experiment — impress your kid

The plate as a playground: build-your-own chaos, hidden greens, and food that makes kids forget they're eating their vegetables.

🍷

The Eclectic Masterpiece — impress your loved ones

The refinement of a Michelin-starred restaurant combined with the boldness of Gen-Z internet culture.

🍽️

The Generous Table — family dinner

The drama of a show-stopping centrepiece with the comfort of a dish made with love.

🏃

The Active Plate — healthy & sport

Clean eating as aspiration rather than restriction: vibrant, micronutrient-rich plates for the everyday athlete.

04 / the guardrails

What a brand AI must never do

The least glamorous, most important part of shipping generative AI for a brand: the hard rules around the model.

Bimi® always whole

Visible and whole on every plate — never cut, puréed or blended. And never suggested raw. Brand rules, hardcoded into the prompt logic.

Content filtering

The system prompt explicitly prohibits dangerous, toxic or inedible ingredients — and any offensive output.

Allergies: the user decides

Allergy option included, with a clear reminder: always check ingredients yourself. The tool doesn't guarantee allergen safety, and never follow a generated recipe blindly.

AI, always declared

Every image and recipe carries its "gegenereerd met AI" label — and behind it, rate limiting against spam and scraping.

05 / under the hood

Infrastructure that treats a campaign spike like a normal day

Gemini behind a secured API

The browser never talks to Gemini — it calls our own keyed, rate-limited API, and the FastAPI service runs the pipeline against Gemini on Vertex AI, streaming the recipe back step by step as each stage finishes.

Autoscaling with high availability

Cloud Run scales from a handful of instances to dozens in under a minute when the campaign pushes.

Zero-downtime deploys

Blue/green with manual approval to production and rollback in seconds. Multi-zone Firestore with daily backups behind it.

Keyless CI/CD

OIDC authentication from the pipeline — zero API keys stored in the repo. All infrastructure declared as code with Terraform.

06 / links

Try it with your own fridge

Try it live ↗← Back to Latest Work Talk to me about it →

Client work made at .monks — my full-time job — with the Gardeners creative team for Bimi®. The captures are from the production tool; every food image you see was AI-generated by the tool itself.