Expiry Tracker

Inspiration

Canadians are throwing out more food than they realize, food that has been wasted. In 2017, the National Zero Waste Council conducted research on household food waste in Canada, and the results blew us away • 63% of the food Canadians throw away could have been eaten • For the average Canadian household that percentage amounts to 140 kilograms of wasted food per year, at a cost of 1,100 dollars per year • That would mean, in Canada 2.2 million tonnes of edible food is wasted every year! This amounts to $17 billion dollars Wasting food doesn’t mean that we’re wasting money, it means we’re wasting resources that were used to grow, produce and distribute that food to consumers. But that’s not it….. wasting food has a significant carbon footprint, contributing to Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s 2.2. million tonnes of avoidable household food waste is equivalent to 9.8 million tonnes of CO2 and 2.1 million cars on the road! The best way to decrease food waste is to prevent it from happening in the first place. People tend to overbuy groceries and once they put it in their fridge, they tend to forget about it. There should be a better way to keep track of all of the food a person buys. This is where we come in! Our easy-to-use app captures the expiration date of all of your groceries and keeps track of it. So instead of checking your fridge for expiry dates, you could just check the app instead! It’s extremely easy and extremely useful. Let’s say you’re out and about thinking about what to cook, the worst feeling is coming home to expired foods. This way you can check your app, and if it’s expired, you can grab the ingredient on your way! Not only are you saving food, you’re saving money, time, and the planet!

What it does

Utilizes image analysis tools in Python (Opencv/Pytesseract) to read the expiry dates off of groceries. These expiry dates are displayed through an app.

How we built it

It was built through the use of the Python libraries Kivy, Opencv, and Pytessercat

Challenges we ran into

There were many difficulties, one being that images needed to be contoured/enhanced to be properly read. Kivy required a steep learning curve as well given there are many different ways to accomplish the same thing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to successfully implement an app while learning concepts that were new to us within a relatively short amount of time.

What we learned

Object oriented programming is very powerful and can be very complicated. The skills learnt in applying programming to research are transferrable and can be used in many ways.

What's next for Expiry Tracker

The next step would be to scale this product up in size and create a version suitable for enterprises and big box stores. Perhaps even warehouses of distributers as well, as a way to keep track of what inventory would expire when. The app could also then be modified to perhaps alert customers if nearby stores had found expiring soon that would be sold at a discounted price as well, or likewise for restaurants near end of shift.