Chefess

Chefess Logo
Chef's Dashboard
Hero Section
Catalogue
Chef Profile

Inspiration

Food often comes to define who we are. No matter how far away we are from our home, food connects us to our roots. Food engages our senses beyond just taste. One bite of our comfort food can take us back to our pleasant memories of the past.

Today, multitudes of people live away from home, sick of the same repetitive food from restaurants, craving for a touch of homeliness. Uber Eats and Swiggy deliver food but do they deliver the mood?

This is where Chefess comes in. We wish to unlock the buried potential of female homemakers by empowering them to set up their small business. As we know, small businesses are known for their attention to details and thoughtfulness.

We believe that inside every female homemaker lies a dormant superpower. The power to touch hearts. The power to spread joy and love through food. Good food only tastes good, but great food makes you feel good. And great food is what Chefess promises to deliver.

Chefess aims to empower women by providing them with a platform to support themselves as a home-based chef. Countless women are grounded to their homes with suppressed dreams, for they lack the resources and support to launch their dream businesses. Our plan is to help them attain financial independence. We also aspire to connect our hungry customers to warm, delicious food - made with love and care.

What it does

The website enables women to start their own business as a home-based chef. The chefs will only have to arrange - the requirements necessary to cook up delicious dishes.
Our service covers almost everything from putting up their menu online to managing orders to payment processing.
Hungry customers can search for dishes by location, name or the Chef behind a dish. Once a customer checks out, the order is communicated to the Chef.
Both sides receive a verification code to ensure safety and confirm the identity of the customer.
At present, customers will have to pick up their meal by themselves or use a pickup service like Dunzo.
The Chefs are presented with a dashboard where they can manage their orders through a Kanban board. Chefs can also access their revenue data, business stats and past transactions through the dashboard.

How we built it

As we had limited time we focused on the main features and design.

We used Figma to design the webpages since we were so keen on making a beautiful UI.
The website backend was made using Node JS, Express JS, and MongoDB as the database.
We integrated google maps API to track Users live location and to locate the nearest chefs
We used React js to make the client-side and connected the routes using HTTP-proxy middleware.
We used HTML/CSS/JS for the front-end

Challenges I ran into

Induja - Being a newbie to hackathons, I was apprehensive about whether I’ll be able to keep up with the pace of hackathons and contribute to them meaningfully. I had minor hiccups trying to get used to Figma as I am an Adobe XD user by default. Eventually, I got to overcome these and contribute.

Arsalaan - As this was my second hackathon, I was nervous and also excited, I had a little bit of knowledge of React.Js, but with the help of Mentors, I gained confidence and mastered the basics of react.js. I helped in the backend as well as the UI designing. For me, the challenging part was to convert Figma to HTML and CSS. But due to limited time, I could only create 2 pages. I decided on the workflow of our website and improvised everyone. Overall the experience was great and the coding spirit was spine-chilling

Aarush - I faced problems in getting tokens for Oauth and Google Maps API was new for me. So I had to spend time going through google maps API. Also converting Figma to React pages was a tedious and time taking task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re super proud to have gotten this far into this project. Chefess is a huge endeavor and though we weren’t able to code it down entirely, we were able to quickly adapt and focus on the design in order to present a working solution. We are super proud that we brushed up our teaming skills and learned how to manage time efficiently. We are Above all, we’re beyond pleased to have come up with a solution that could be a stepping stone to innumerable women out there. It makes us proud to know that our project can impact society for the good.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about planning and communication. We learned time management skills and how to cooperate between team members. We also learned that division of work is also an important strategy. The other things we learned are:

React Js - Mapping and Routing
Figma - Basic UI skills
Video editing skills
Oauth - Google authorization with MongoDB as a database

Overall it was a great experience participating and discovering new people. The mentors were also very good and helpful. I am thankful to all the organizers to give us this opportunity.

What's next for Chefess

As for the features, Chefess could use a delivery feature and refined options to browse for dishes. The website needs some work as we’d hit a roadblock and were unable to finish by the deadline. We also plan to implement location-based searching visually using maps. We will make the payment system more secure and improve the chef dashboard as well. We will also create a Community section where people could know about more Foodies in their Area. For example, the person who ordered the most in a week will be the Foodie of the weak

Chefess only scratches the surface of countless possibilities and use cases it can offer. For starters, Chefess could be extended to provide products besides food such as crafts, artwork, handmade articles, and much more. In this way, Chefess could possibly impact more lives by supporting small businesses that don’t have to be food-related as well.