Àlacart

Inspiration

A lot of day-to-day chores are being innovated with tech; parking, transport, food, shopping, all can be handled from your phone. Just one is lagging behind, grocery shopping. Sure you can get groceries placed in your trunk, but you still have to sit and peruse through the plethora of products finding what you like, and forget trying to balance your diet with a healthy meal plan without a calculator. We wanted an intelligent solution that can come up with the best individualized grocery list possible, and above all we wanted it to be easy to use, frictionless.

What it does

Àlacart is the ultimate tool for creating your perfect grocery list and meal plan. Rather than simply showing you your macros and calories and then leaving you with all the work, Àlacart does all the hard work for you. Using Àlacart is as simple as creating your profile one time, interacting with the platform to teach it what flavors and foods you like, and then creating your perfect meal plan which Àlacart directly translates into a grocery list that you can either get delivered, or pick up at a local store.

How we built it

We used Django to start building out the web app, and on the back end we used a really amazing API called Spoonacular.

Challenges we ran into

Web development was not a strong suit of any of ours and it turned out to be a good challenge to construct a usable website that did what we need it to do.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For the majority of our team, this is our very first Hackathon, so if we turn in anything at all we will all be very proud for getting it done. It's a good exercise to build not only web development skills, but also in teamwork, design, and ideation.

What we learned

Web development is hard.

What's next for Àlacart

We went with a webapp for portability, but ultimately we see this as a mobile app. The algorithms for recommendation could stand to be refined, the design of the site might not be as fluid as we'd like, and there is probably a whole host of new features and interactive elements that could be built in with more time.

Built With

• django
• heroku
• python
• spoonacular