Eco Food Tracker

Fight food waste and save money! Our gamified website tracks food expiration, sends reminders, generates recipes, and connects the user with food banks. Let’s make waste-free living fun and impactful!

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Inspiration

All of our team members share a common problem, which is struggling to save the food in our kitchen. As college students, we understand the difficulty of budgeting meals and often feel frustrated or guilty when we waste foods that have expired or go bad. Additionally, we are aware of the negative impact wasted food has on the environment: excess greenhouse gas emissions and land degradation to name a few. Because of these two issues, we are inspired to create a solution that can help students like us practice sustainability.

What it does

The website has four main features: The user inputs the name of the grocery ingredients they bought and the AI would determine when they would expire. From this data, the website will notify the user a couple days before the expiration date to remind them to finish this food before it goes bad, offering various recipes they can implement to finish that food item. Third, the website tracks the data on how much food the user has saved over time, displaying this insightful information in a graph form. Additionally, this data helps to “gamify” the website, by allowing a cute plant avatar to grow for every food item saved. Lastly, a page is dedicated to enabling the user to donate unused food to local food banks by displaying a map with all of the local food banks’ information (name, address, distance, and contact).

How we built it

We built our project as a website. At first, we hand-drew sketches of what we wanted the interface to look like. After these simple drawings, we used them as inspiration on how to construct our website (e.g., number of pages, color theme, buttons, various features, etc.)

Challenges we ran into

A majority of our team are first-time hackers and have never used Git or Github before. To overcome this lack of experience, we worked diligently to learn how to use these resources through a Sunhacks workshop, YouTube videos, and online websites/tutorials.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since we are first-time hackers, we are mostly proud of showing up, even though all of us came into it solo and are either 1st year or 2nd year students. Other than that, we are proud of how much we’ve learned by working with new software and AI.

What we learned

We learned how to work well in a team where each person’s ideas are respected and heard. We collectively learned how to make a website and the basics of using Git, Github, and Visual Studio Code. Some of us also played around with using AI (ChatGPT) to help generate components for the website.

What's next for Eco Food Tracker

What’s next is cleaning up the user interface so that the website looks more professional, put together, and aesthetically pleasing. If our abilities and time would allow us to, we would like to integrate image-recognition capabilities so that the user can take a picture of their receipt or the food that they bought instead of having to manually type it into the website.

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