chec:xpire

• 

  have *you* checked the back of your fridge lately?

Inspiration

How many times have you opened your fridge door and examined its contents for something to eat/cook/stare at and ended up finding a forgotten container of food in the back of the fridge (a month past its expiry date) instead? Are you brave enough to eat it, or does it immediately go into the trash?

The most likely answer would be to dispose of it right away for health and safety reasons, but you'd be surprised - food wastage is a problem that many countries such as Canada contend with every year, even as world hunger continues to increase! Big corporations and industries contribute to most of the wastage that occurs worldwide, but we as individual consumers can do our part to reduce food wastage as well by minding our fridges and pantries and making sure we eat everything that we procure for ourselves.

Enter chec:xpire - the little app that helps reduce food wastage, one ingredient at a time!

What it does

chec:xpire takes stock of the contents of your fridge and informs you which food items are close to their best-before date. chec:xpire also provides a suggested recipe which makes use of the expiring ingredients, allowing you to use the ingredients in your next meal without letting them go to waste due to spoilage!

How we built it

We built the backend using Express.js, which laid the groundwork for interfacing with Solace, an event broker. The backend tracks food items (in a hypothetical refrigerator) as well as their expiry dates, and picks out those that are two days away from their best-before date so that the user knows to consume them soon. The app also makes use of the co:here AI to retrieve and return recipes that make use of the expiring ingredients, thus providing a convenient way to use up the expiring food items without having to figure out what to do with them in the next couple days.

The frontend is a simple Node.js app that subscribes to "events" (in this case, food approaching their expiry date) through Solace, which sends the message to the frontend app once the two-day mark before the expiry date is reached. A notification is sent to the user detailing which ingredients (and their quantities) are expiring soon, along with a recipe that uses the ingredients up.

Challenges we ran into

The scope of our project was a little too big for our current skillset; we ran into a few problems finding ways to implement the features that we wanted to include in the project, so we had to find ways to accomplish what we wanted to do using other methods.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All but one member of the team are first-time hackathon participants - we're very proud of the fact that we managed to create a working program that did what we wanted it to, despite the hurdles we came across while trying to figure out what frameworks we wanted to use for the project!

What we learned

• planning out a project that's meant to be completed within 36 hours is difficult, especially if you've never done it before!
• there were some compromises that needed to be made due to a combination of framework-related hiccups and the limitations of our current skillsets, but there's victory to be had in seeing a project through to the end even if we weren't able to accomplish every single little thing we wanted to
• Red Bull gives you wings past midnight, apparently

What's next for chec:xpire

A fully implemented frontend would be great - we ran out of time!

Built With

• cohere
• express.js
• github
• javascript
• node.js
• solace