Personalized Recipe Recommendations for Toddlers Based on Nutrient Intake and Food Preferences

Abstract

Many guidelines on healthy diet for toddlers have been established; however, they do not suggest recipes for daily meals. Even though recipe recommendation methodologies have been well-studied and implemented, they are not designed specifically with toddlers in mind. Instead, existing recipe recommendation systems focus on users' food preference and the nutrition of an individual dish without considering the total daily nutrient needs. In order to provide toddlers with a healthy diet, it is important for parents to know how much food toddlers should be eating and what foods satisfy their daily nutrient requirement, since feeding style and attitude of parents can influence toddlers' present and future dietary behavior and food preference. Given that toddler recipes recommended to parents with the required nutrition can reduce bias introduced by parents' own food preference, there is a need for a recipe recommendation system specifically designed for toddlers. In this paper, we propose a personalized toddler recipe recommendation system which incorporates the standard nutrition guideline published by the US government at ChooseMyPlate.gov with users' food preferences. Our recommender, which makes suggestions using initial data gathered from user profiles and MyPlate information, suggests relevant recipes for toddlers. Recommended recipes not only satisfy the daily nutrient intake from different food groups for toddlers, but also offer them a healthy eating habit.