Bok - Asian Grocer Deals Hub

Inspiration

Half our team grew up shopping at Asian grocers in Melbourne. With the rising cost of living, and the hidden price discounts, often 30-50% lower than Coles/Woolies, that were only found in our mum's WeChat or Facebook group, we wanted to put those deals somewhere anyone could find them.

What it does

Snap a photo of a price tag or flyer in any language (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese), and Bok extracts the product, price, discount, and store. Deals show up on a feed of today's top bargains and on a map of Asian grocers near you. Search lets you find the cheapest version of a specific item within walking distance.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js, React, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TypeScript. Backend: Supabase Postgres with Next.js API routes. AI: Google Gemini's vision model handles OCR, translation, and extraction in one prompt. Map: Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles.

Challenges we ran into

Gemini hallucinated prices on blurry photos, so we rewrote the prompt to return null on uncertain fields and route those to manual review. Chinese product names rarely have clean English equivalents, so we store both versions and search across them. Clustering pins on the map without breaking our custom pin design also ate more time than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working end-to-end loop: photo in, structured deal out, live on the map. The four mockup screens in our deck look like a finished product, not a weekend hack. And the cabbage logo plus the auntie voice ("hand-picked by your auntie") gives Bok personality, which most hackathon projects skip.

What we learned

AI works best as a translator between messy human input and clean data. The value sits in the database that fills up over time, not the model itself. We also cut about half the features from our original spec, and the demo got stronger every time we cut something.

What's next for Bok - Asian Grocer Deals Hub

Deal verification, more grocers on board, and tighter extraction accuracy by end of 2026. Wishlist alerts and pricing analytics for businesses in 2027. Expansion across Victoria and into New South Wales in 2028.