EAT.ME

Inspiration

Can you list all the food items currently in your kitchen? Probably not. And that's a problem because it leads to food waste.

How? Well, if you don't know what food items you have, how can you possibly eat them. So, those items just sit their in your kitchen, forgotten, doomed to go to waste. They only come to our attention when their rotten stench pervades the house. But, by then its too late. They must be tossed into the trash can.

EAT.ME designed to tackle this problem, to remind us of the food our kitchen houses, to save food from the trash can.

What it does

EAT.ME is a mobile application (for android and iOS) which stores all the food items a user has in their kitchen.

After creating an account, the user can store a new food item by providing the food item's name, expiration date, and food item's photo. To further help the user keep track of the food item, they are also encouraged to list which "space" they stored the food item in. Currently, the app supports 3 spaces, fridge, pantry, and snack drawer.

The user can tap on any of the spaces listed in the main page of the app and it will show them all the food items they have in that space, along with the food items' photos and numbers of days till expiry.

For example, say a user buys pasta and tomatoes. They will create two new food items for each of the items, providing the items name, expiry date, photo, and then placing the pasta in "pantry" space and tomatoes in "fridge" space.

EAT.ME also has a recipes page which displays various recipes a user can try out. Clicking on a recipe takes the user to a webpage containing the recipe instructions.

How we built it

1. We used figma to wireframe our prototype for the GUI.
2. We used Dart/Flutter to convert that wireframe into a real mobile application.
3. We use Firebase Authentication to handle creating/deleting user accounts as well as logging in and logging out.
4. The food item's image were stored in Firebase Storage.
5. Cloud Firestore is the primary storage, used to store the food item's name, expiry date, and a url for the food item's image (url created through Firebase Storage).

Challenges we ran into

Two of us were completely new to Flutter/Dart and using Firebase and the third person, while not a complete newbie, still barely had 2 months of experience with Flutter/Dart. As a result, it took us much time and effort to get even the basics of the GUI implemented. We weren't too familiar with Firebase either and often times ran into road blocks with how to write and read data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Developing a functional mobile app in a short time span
• Learning the basics of Dart/Flutter
• Learning the art of solving problems

What's next for EAT.ME

We want to replace manually entering all the food items in the user's kitchen with automation. Specially, we plan to use OCR to scan a grocery recipe to automatically figure out what all food items where bought. Furthermore, we would love if EAT.ME could figure out the expiration date of an food item by itself -- using the food item's name and a little help from Google. Also, we want to recommend recipes to the user based on the food items they currently have in their kitchen, thus encouraging the user to consume all the food.

Built With

• cloud-storage
• dart
• figma
• firestore
• flutter
• flutterfire