eatseek

Eatseek landing page, contains general info about the site.
User information summary. Contains address, radius, dietary needs, and their goals and budget.
First of four info gathering steps. Prompts user for this address and travel radius.
First page of the meal plan. Shows an interactive map with every store as well as a list below.
Recipes tab: displays a list of recipes where the ingredients and cooking instructions can be expanded.

Inspiration

As college students ourselves, we too relate to this project. Next year, we lose access to the dining hall and are faced with the reality that eating healthy on a tight budget is genuinely hard. It's not that people don't want to eat well; it's that cheap, convenient food in the US is almost always the unhealthy kind, and that structural imbalance is one of the leading drivers of obesity. We built this app because we wanted to make the healthy choice the easy choice. Eatseek turns meal planning from a chore into something anyone can do in minutes. Whether you're a student stretching every dollar, a busy professional with no time to think about dinner, or someone just trying to eat better without breaking the bank, this is for you.

What it does

Once a user makes an account, EatSeek prompts them for their budget, macro preferences, location, and shopping radius. From there, our app finds nearby grocery stores, prices out real ingredients, and generates personalized recipes tailored to exactly what you can afford and what your body needs, complete with step-by-step cooking instructions. Every suggestion is healthy, budget-friendly, and ready to make.

How we built it

We built EatSeek entirely in JAC, which allowed us to write both the frontend and backend extremely compactly and kept our entire project to just one or two files. We also used JAC Builder and JAC Coder to accelerate development and bring our ideas to life faster.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was with our original idea: an application where doctors could prompt patients for information before appointments to speed up in-person visit times. Unfortunately, after several hours of work, we discovered this already exists. Luckily, we pivoted to EatSeek: an original solution that we're genuinely excited about and could see ourselves using every day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We aren't just proud that we managed to use JAC to make a functional full stack app in under 24 hours. We're proud that we created something that actually has the potential to help and improve people's lives. Eatseek isn't just a hackathon project, it's a product we'd actually use ourselves and we believe could make healthy eating possible for students, busy families, or anyone on a tight budget.

What we learned

Building Eatseek taught us just how fast you can move when you have the right tools. Even with a lot of time lost by changing our project idea JAC made full stack development easy. What would have taken days of wiring together separate frameworks and files came together in hours. It gave us more time to focus on what actually matters. Building something useful.

What's next for Eatseek

As we mentioned, next year we face the very problem EatSeek aims to solve. We hope to continue this work until it's ready for real consumer usage. And if nothing else, it'll be ready for us. We're prepared to keep building EatSeek on JAC, expanding features, refining the experience, and turning what started as a 24-hour hackathon project into something that we believe could genuinely make a difference.