Eco Eats

EcoEats

Purpose:

Food waste is an extensive issue touching all across the globe; in fact, according to the UN Environmente Programme, approximately ⅓ of food produced for human consumption globally is lost or wasted annually (Made in CA). After perceiving this information, we were inspired to create a website that provides you with numerous zero-waste recipes by just scanning your grocery receipt. Our innovative website not only addresses the pressing concern of food waste, but also empowers individuals to make a meaningful impact in their own kitchens!

General Information:

Interactive website that offers clients vast and meaningful alternatives to unsustainable cooking. Benefits range from the reduction of food waste to enhancing and simplifying meal planning. Our model is unique because it incorporates fast and easy-to-use technology (i.e. receipt scanning) which will provide users recipes within seconds, in comparison to traditional, tedious websites on the market that require users to manually input each ingredient, unnecessarily prolonging their stay.

How we built it:

The frontend of our project was created with HTML and CSS, whereas the backend was created with Flask. Image recognition services were implemented using Google Cloud API.

We chose HTML because it is light weighted and fast to load, ensuring a splendid user interface experience. We chose CSS in view of the fact that it is time-saving due to its simple-to-use nature, as well as its striking ability to offer flexible positioning of design elements. As first-time hackers without much experience, we chose Flask in view of its simplicity and features, such as a built-in development server and quick debugger. Google Cloud API was pivotal in extracting information provided by the user because of its text recognition feature in its OCR tool, allowing us to center our model around grocery receipts.

Challenges we ran into:

Learning HTML and CSS - 2 of our group members were relatively new to coding and had no experience in frontend web dev whatsoever! Delegating tasks effectively between team members spending the night vs. going home - Constant collaboration over Discord was crucial! Learning Google Cloud API - All of our group members were new to Google Cloud API, so simultaneously learning + implementing it within 36 hours was definitely challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

As a complete beginner team, we are extremely ecstatic about our large-scale efforts and progress at Hack the 6ix! From learning web dev from scratch to experimenting with completely new frameworks to creating our personal logo to making and editing a video in under an hour, our experience has been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride. Although new to the field, we made sure to bravely tackle each challenge presented to us and give our best efforts throughout the hacking period, which can be exemplified by our choices to work long hours past midnight, ask mentors for advice when needed, and constantly improvise our front and backend for a more complete user interface experience!

What’s next for Eco Eats:

YES, we’re not done just yet! Here are a few things that we think we can consolidate with our current idea of Eco Eats to make it a cut above!

A feature to take a photo of your receipt on the website A feature to let users see other recipes with similar ingredients that can be substituted with the ones they have Expand our idea to PC parts, so that we can offer clients possible ideas for custom PCs to assemble with their old receipts