Dun Buy More (The Subtle Bottle)

Inspiration

We really want to solve the issue of food wastage because we believe that it can be done. This hackathon forced us to brainstorm, refine our ideas and implement a version of it for the first time!

What it does

DUNPAYMORE strives to solve the issue of food waste through Prevention. We aim to do this by assigning a sense of ownership to each household. Households can easily take a photo of their receipts, and all the food, with their corresponding estimated expiry and category (eg. Marigold HL MILK 1L) will be extracted and displayed in a simple user interface, grouped by category, with an "expiring soon" category. This way, whenever any individual wants to buy food, they can easily see if they already have what they want or have something similar at home.

We hope that this convenient app provides a subconscious effect that makes people settle for food they already have instead of buying new ones.

We focus specifically on NTUC FairPrice in this project, as it is the most common way people in Singapore buy groceries. We also chose to group by households instead of individuals, as most households share a single fridge.

How we built it

We created 2 apps for this. One is the web app, "dunByMore", hosted using Google Firebase, with Firestore is the database. It is built using React and Next.js. We optimised the web app for mobile phones that is the device that people would use when they are outside and near grocery shops.

The second is an API for the receipt extractor, hosted on Google Cloud Platform, "scanthisreceipt". It is built using Python and Flask. PaddleOCR and regex was used in conjunction to extract the food information from the receipt.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time getting Firebase Authentication and React to work well. We also spent almost half the time trying to deploy the Python Flask app, as we faced issues of missing libraries on Heroku and Digital Ocean. This led us to explore Docker and Google Cloud, the latter which was very new to us, and we sunk a lot time just to deploy the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integrating the camera in our app! Using computer vision in our app. (Finally) hosting both of our apps!

What we learned

Deployment is still a huge issue for us. Firebase authentication

What's next for Dun Buy More

Features

Statistics Page to compare your household's food wastage with the national average using our existing collected data. For each food item, we allow users to mark it as consumed or disposed (meaning wasted). We can calculate the food wastage using the household size, which users input when signing up.

Refinement

While using this app, you may find some areas which need polishing. We definitely want to write better code to handle these. Improving the OCR and obtaining the full list of abbreviations of FairPrice receipt items and their associated categories is also on our wishlist.