Nutricipe is a meal planning system that will allow individuals and families alike to create healthy meals based on a list of ingredients that they specify. Nutricipe will proceed to offer a list of healthy recipes that can be made with what you have on hand -- if you're short by a few items, Nutricipe will even offer you a shopping list of ingredients.

Getting daily nutrients that are necessary for good health and organizing proper diets is problematic due to the variety of choices and inconsistent information about nutrition. Unhealthy diets lead to poorer health and increased risk for health problems such as obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and cancer. The problem is not just relegated to choices and conflicting information; lack of time to come up with healthy meal ideas and special dietary needs also plays a role in poor meal choices.

For the purposes of Nutricipe's prototype, our initial customers will be working class citizens and students, all in the 20-40 years-old age range. This will allow the changes that a healthier diet brings on to have a greater effect on improving the user's immediate and future health.

Nutricipe will map out healthy meals for you and your family. The longer healthy eating habits (as encouraged by Nutricipe) are followed, the more Nutricipe will lend itself to a healthier lifestyle; your risks for certain diseases will be reduced, in some cases greatly. Nutricipe will assist individuals in eating healthier by empowering them with the proper tools: authoritative, nutritional advice based on specific profile preferences and values; healthy recipes with instructions and nutritional content calculators, and effective, efficient shopping lists to acquire all of the necessary ingredients to fix the right meal, the right way, every time.

The soul of Nutricipe will be in the form of its database; Nutricipe will pull data from the Nutrient Data Laboratory and other third-party sources, whereupon the data will be normalized into a custom format onto an Oracle DB. Requests for recipes will be made to the database via an interface from Nutricipe's web server. The web server in turn will manage all connections that clients' web, mobile and client (stand-alone, PC based) software applications will make. The GUIs and menus contained within these applications will be the beginning and end to any query that will be made.

Nutricipe's initial source of capital will be in the form of grants. A grant proposal will be written to SBIR and an auxiliary proposal may be drafted to NIH in order to secure basic funding. If Nutricipe's primary source of funding will not cover all of our costs up to and including Phase 2, we will consider applying for a business loan from CIT or SBA.

All capital derived from grants will be dedicated to the purchase of hardware and to the costs involved in developing the software components for the Nutricipe system. For Phase 2 of Nutricipe's development cycle, the team will be considered student interns, thereby preserving funding as much as possible. For Phase 3, the team's salaries will adjust to market rates, as all funding from this point onward will be earned from software sales of Nutricipe.

As the cost of healthcare rises, people with existing conditions and/or unhealthy eating patterns will seek ways to maintain a healthier lifestyle through proper nutrition and exercise. Our goal is to provide both likely and potential customers with a meal planning tool that is customizable based on gender, age, and current health considerations.