BiteSize

Ever faced the dilemma of an open fridge–uncertain about missing or expiring items? Or returned home to discover the lack of ingredients for a decent meal? BiteSize has you covered!

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Inspiration

As a friend group, we always spend a lot of time deciding what to eat in order to have a meal that would be inclusive to all of our friends. When trying to find a solution to this problem, we realized it's the same one our parents often go through trying to decide meals for us, as well parents and people worldwide. After learning about the devastating amount of food waste, especially with high global poverty rate, we know we had to utilize our skills to address this problem.

What it does

Our app, BiteSize, allows users to optimize meal selection by taking into account the preferences and dietary restrictions of all those participating. Users then choose between eating in or out. If the user chooses to eat in, the app will generate recipes based on what’s available in the user’s fridge. If the user chooses to eat out, the app will then recommend food based on the user’s dietary restrictions and preferences that’s saved in the app.

BiteSize uses a pressure sensor to detect what’s running low in your fridge and adds it to your shopping list via Amazon’s Alexa.

To invite more users to the app, BiteSize allows users to find and add friends. Whenever a recipe or restaurant item is viewed, the user is also able to see which of their friends recommend it.

How we built it

We used an Arduino board, touch sensor, and ultrasonic sensor to detect objects that would be in the user’s fridge. We then connected the resulting output with amazon Alexa to facilitate the automatic grocery list update.

We utilized React Native with JavaScript and JSON data storage to develop the mobile application for BiteSize.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is all computer science students, but we decided to take on the challenge of having a hardware component to our project. This proved to be tricky because we had to simultaneously learn, develop, and test within the twenty four hour time limit of the challenge. We were also developing our React Native application at the same time and had to be extremely cognizant of our time management. We had to pick and choose as well as reorder tasks for maximum efficacy, as well as help each other solve bugs along the way. Still, we were able to successfully complete our project!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is extremely proud to say that we completed development for our React Native application as well as our hardware feature! Our team quickly adapted to learning how to operate hardware and also took on new frameworks such as Tailwind CSS. We conducted customer research, created high-fidelity wireframes, and created a fully-functioning React Native mobile app. Despite the tribulations we experienced, our team has come out of this challenge stronger and closer! We learned so much from not only our project, but each other as well.

What we learned

During the past twenty four hours, we learned how much food gets wasted due to being unable to decipher a product’s expiration date. We also realized how much parents, especially single parents, suffer each day deciding on what to make based on their family dietary needs and wants. Food waste is an extremely large problem world wide, with the top fifty percent of earners wasting millions of tons of food daily. Food that seldom reaches the other half of the population. Furthermore, everyday people struggle to decide on meals to meet the tastes of their families, specifically single and underprivileged parents. As a result of parents struggling to find food their children will like, to restaurant-goers wasting an unsatisfying meal, food-related choices contribute to disastrous amounts of food waste everyday, choices that BiteSize can help you make! Our app will help streamline this indecisive process for families, young adults, and anyone else that struggles with meal-related decisions everyday. Our app contributes to not only reducing decision fatigue, but also promoting food waste reduction, and an easier everyday life.

What's next for BiteSize

Moving forward, we hope to continue improving our application to include features such as reminders of when your food is expiring and using computer vision technology to scan the user’s receipts and fridge to get a better understanding of what to restock on and when as well as receiving better food recommendations from the app for both eating in and eating out.

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