Ingredient-Only Recipe Recommendation via Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Sustainable Cooking

Abstract

This paper presents a novel ingredient-based recipe recommendation system that suggests dishes using only available ingredients, eliminating reliance on user preference data. As online culinary platforms host millions of recipes, users struggle to find dishes that match their pantry constraints, dietary needs, and culinary preferences. Unlike traditional methods like TF-IDF, which lack semantic depth, or existing methods such as graph neural networks (GNNs), which incur high computational costs and struggle with cold-start scenarios, our self-supervised contrastive learning approach maps ingredients and recipes into a 64-dimensional semantic space, capturing complex culinary relationships for precise, scalable recommendations. The system enhances representation quality without user history by leveraging dual-modal Word2Vec embeddings that incorporate ingredients and cooking instructions and optimizing them using triplet loss. Using a dataset of 122,265 standardized recipes, our model achieves a 79.11% ingredient match ratio, 70% recommendation diversity (vs. 50% for baselines), and sub-100ms query times. It outperforms TF-IDF and KNN by 14% in relevance. The implementation addresses ingredient normalization, rare ingredient handling, and diverse cuisine representation, promoting sustainable cooking by maximizing ingredient use and reducing food waste. This work advances the methodology of recommendation systems by addressing the cold-start problem and ensuring privacy through user-data-free modeling. It supports practical culinary applications, contributing to sustainable cooking practices and culinary informatics.