A former Oak Harbor military man recently launched a cell phone app that may become invaluable to those who aren’t adept at planning ahead for meals.

A user just needs to take a photo of food in a refrigerator and artificial intelligence will create recipes.

Luis Ortiz Orantes, a 27 year-old aviation maintenance technician, took a simple concept — to have AI make recipes — into a quick and user-friendly app “FridgeF” so that anyone, even your grandma, can snap a picture of the inside of a fridge and generate five recipes based on the ingredients.

“You open the fridge in the kitchen,” Ortiz Orantes said. “It’s an overwhelming amount of ingredients, and you look at it and then you’re like ‘Oh my God what do I do?’ Now with this, you can simply take a picture of your fridge and this app tells you what to cook.”

The app is trained to identify unique foods, like mashed potatoes or even a steak in a see-through container.

Ortiz Orantes developed the app over four months from a computer in his own apartment as an after-work hobby. He launched the official app in August, and it has gone through an update since then to get rid of bugs. Ortiz Orantes worked as an operations specialist and is now an aircraft technician, but he comes from a humble background.

Having moved here from El Salvador at 10 years old, Ortiz Orantes said he faced many challenges adjusting to a new language and culture in the U.S. Seeking to leave the dangerous area where he spent his teen years and early adulthood, he later joined the Navy and served at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island from 2018 to 2022.

Having overcome so many challenges, Ortiz Orantes says he is equipped to scale the app and integrate it into everyday people’s daily lives.

“I have a lot of self-belief that I can scale this to grow immensely,” he said. “I want to help people out, make their life easier.”

Soon, Ortiz Orantes hopes to expand his one-man team to bring on a marketing specialist and a social media person. But he doesn’t plan on stopping there.

“There’s big dreams for this. I mean, eventually partnering with a fridge company or any engineering company that wants to install the app that comes built-in on a fridge,” Ortiz Orantes said. “I mean this is, in my opinion, breakthrough technology.”

Download FridgeF for free on the Apple App Store. After a free seven-day trial, it charges a $4 monthly membership fee. The app is coming to Google Play next month.

FridgeF