EasyEBT

Inspiration

Our inspiration for EasyEBT came from our knowledge of the effects of food insecurity, which we especially witnessed during Covid. Individuals of lower socioeconomic status often struggle with finding healthy and affordable food options; with Easy EBT we hope to empower individuals who rely on SNAP benefits and help them live healthy and sustainable lifestyles.

What it does

EasyEBT allows the user to search for stores with EBT-eligible grocery items nearby and browse through and add them to cart. The recipe page includes healthy and easy-to-prepare recipes, with an option to toggle through dynamically suggested recipes using items added to cart. Users can click on recipes that interest them to see the complete instructions and ingredients list.

How we built it

We used web scraping scripting in Python to curate real-time data of EBT-eligible items at nearby stores like Walmart, Safeway, Ralphs, providing users with accurate and up-to-date information. We used Bootstrap to provide an intuitive user-friendly interface and Python in Django for database management. We extensively used JavaScript scripts for dynamically updating items added to cart using session storage data and toggling between suggested recipes with applicable items. Github was immensely useful throughout the development process, with lots of merges and pulls as we made changes.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we encountered was in the process of web scraping. If the websites that we scraped the grocery data from like Ralphs and Walmart changed their format, our scraping code would no longer be accurate. Also, these websites were blocking our scripts with Captcha. In addition, coordinating between team members working on backend and frontend proved to be quite difficult, and required a lot of meticulous version control and clear communication.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finally learned how to properly use Github for version control, which is super necessary for collaborative tech development. We’re also proud of being able to accomplish most of our vision from our initial Figma design with extensive front-end design.

What we learned

Front-end development can be really tricky! None of us were super experienced with front-end design; we spent a lot of time trying to fix specific features and get them to look like what we envisioned.

What's next for Easy EBT

We aim to expand our database of grocery items to a greater variety of grocery stores. Additionally, we would like to enhance our recipe database by adding more filters to generate more personalized recommendations. Another feature that we would implement in the future is in suggested recipes: if a certain recipe has more ingredients than other recipes it should appear higher in the page.