EthicalEats

Inspiration

From false assumptions to fake advertisements, many consumers find it difficult to select the product that best alleviates environmental impacts. By making detailed information of the companies’ ethics easily accessible, we hope to aid consumers in their daily decision-making.

What it does

Our product, EthicalEats, is an app whose main purpose is to help consumers shop for food with easily accessible background information on the products they’re looking for. We have both a physical barcode scanner option and an online shopping option. With each product comes information on the company/producer and how ethical they are. We also wanted to foster a community where people could build off of one another by posting recommendations.

How we built it

Thought out overall low fidelity for figma implementation
Implement into high fidelity design
Adjust high fidelity designs to create more engaging and user friendly designs
Attempt at web scraping to receive bigger datasets
Optimize time efficiency by adjusting web scraping functions and implementing databases

Challenges we ran into

When we implemented web scraping on our chosen website, we were running into time out errors because of how long it was taking to retrieve information on thousands of companies. We realized that we had a lot of repetitive code that was extending our runtime, and made changes accordingly. With the awareness of time efficiency, we decided to implement databases such that users will not have to wait for the web scraping. Instead, they will only need to update their databases when new resources are added.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, every team member learned and accomplished a lot over the course of this hackathon. We learned so many new skills and worked very cohesively as a team, bouncing ideas off of each other and balancing work so each member would contribute while not being overwhelmed. On the coding side, we implemented web scraping and databases, and we have a great Figma design.

What we learned

We came into the project with no prior knowledge of web scraping, but learning how to code and improve it was both challenging and enlightening. We were also novices in creating databases and all but one team member were new to Figma.

What's next for EthicalEats

We want our information to be as reliable as possible, so we would have to expand our backend resources and capabilities. On the coding end, this encompasses web scraping and databases; more generally, this means more research into company ethics. The other major component that we need to implement is the frontend.