EcoScan

EcoScan is the best way to reduce your carbon footprint, starting at the supermarket. You can scan produce to find out their environmental impact and suggestions for alternate options.

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Inspiration

Did you know that food waste contributes 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the US annually? We were tired of food hidden in the back of the fridge expiring and going to waste. In addition, we had a hard time telling which products were produced at the expense of the environment, so we decided to tackle this problem by making an easy-to-use all-in-one AI-powered app for getting food emission info, tracking the food in your fridge, and making recipes from what's already in your fridge.

What it does

Our app scans barcodes and retrieves a food’s “green score,” which indicates its sustainability, fat, sugar, and salt content, its “nutri-score,” which shows how healthy food is overall, and the CO2 produced by the product’s manufacture. To encourage people to explore more environmentally-conscious alternatives, the app uses AI to suggest similar products with a better “green score.”

In addition, the foods you purchase can be added to a “fridge” list where its due date will be kept track of, allowing you to quickly glance at which food expires soon. To help you get ideas for how to use your leftover food, the app generates recipes based on the food in your fridge using artificial intelligence so you never have to let food go to waste again.

How we built it

Eco Scan is a React Native app styled with Tailwind and powered with two important APIs: OpenFoodFacts (OFF) and ChatGPT. OFF was our one stop shop for all our food facts, supplying both sustainability and health information. For generative content based on what is in your fridge and finding similar foods to the ones you’re scanning, ChatGPT helps select and find alternatives that are later sorted through.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was finding alternatives. Our original attempt of fuzzy finding them was not a success as searching for a food from OFF returns identical items. This is where ChatGPT came in to give us different and healthier alternatives from which we could continue our search.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re the most proud of our Neo Brutalist UI. Neo Brutalism is a style that relies heavily on bold and unique design through raw-unrefined shapes, vibrant colors, and an emphasis on function over form. We spent a lot of time polishing our UI for the best look and feel possible out of our Tailwind style library.

We’re extremely proud of creating an app that is genuinely fun and intriguing to use. There is a childlike wonder in scanning your fridge’s contents just to see what is possible to cook using ChatGPT and the UI is at the core of what enables this fun.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to make user-friendly app design using an uncommon design aesthetic (Neobrutalism) that none of us have used before.

In addition, we have never used ChatGPT in our projects before, so we learned how to effectively prompt engineer in the API call and how to parse the LLM’s response in a format that could be parsed for use in the UI beyond a simple wall of text.

What's next for EcoScan

We are currently working on implementing push notifications, which will notify the user when their food is getting close to expiring, cloud saving

Built With

  • figma
  • openai
  • openfoodfacts
  • reactnative
  • tailwind
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