Carbon Calories

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Inspiration

The University of Waterloo’s very own St. Jerome’s University College, where a couple of us reside, makes delicious food. St. Jerome's has its own Green Team dedicated to making our home-away-from-home more climate-friendly, and our cafeteria already does audits on important metrics like food waste. We were inspired to make an app that assists in making these green decisions when it comes to food.

What it does

Carbon Calories is a website that helps kitchens make informed cooking decisions that reduce carbon emissions and are better for the environment. Users log meals and get immediate data and feedback on their meals' carbon footprint, and they can use this feedback to improve their carbon footprint over time. It's an eco-solution designed for integration into a kitchen's everyday operations.

How we built it

We built the frontend with JavaScript using NextJS. The backend API was created using FastAPI and python. We utilised MongoDB atlas to host the database for user meals and information. The AI insights and suggestions are powered by Google Gemini.

Challenges we ran into

Working with new tools was challenging but rewarding. We struggled a bit at first setting up the repository and programming environment, but ultimately, we got it going and were able to create a prototype for this eco-friendly site!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to prototyped a project for an initiative that we feel is important. We had a lot of fun together working on the project and are proud of the technical skills we learned along the way in web development, backend, and database interaction.

What's next for Carbon Calories

Improved carbon emission estimation: Estimating carbon emissions is not super straightforward. We hope to allow users to enter additional info about the source of their ingredients in the future to improve estimations. We can also see Carbon Calories using real-world datasets to improve the accuracy of the estimations.

Further Catered Insights: We are hoping to market this app for school cafeterias and people who serve food on a large scale. We would like to add insights and suggestions for helping these organizations meet their own specific sustainability goals.

Easier Meal Logging: We hope to add capabilities such as ingredient-scanning for quicker meal entry.