FBI (Facts 'bout Ingredients)

Unmask what the ingredients in your food are used for to hold companies accountable for the things they put in our food.

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Inspiration 🔭

We've noticed that we often find ourselves reading the nutritional and ingredient labels before deciding if we are going to buy something or not -- BUT how often do we actually understand what each of those ingredients do? How often do we actually know whether a random-chemical-sounding-ish name is good for us or not? FBI was made for us to crack down on these suspicious chemicals...

What it does ❓

It converts pictures of food ingredient labels into researched descriptions about each specific ingredient in a intuitive and readable format.

How we built it 🔨

The front-end of our application was developed using React. Our API was written with Python/Flask. We integrated paddleOCR and SerPapi external APIs to do some of the character recognition and analysis tasks.

Challenges we ran into 🚓

  1. Figuring out how to upload images
  2. Getting an accurate reading of text from images
  3. Finding meaningful search results about specific ingredients

Accomplishments that we're proud of 👑

Getting a working demo of our project done at 6 am 😎

What we learned 🎒

  1. Building RESTful API endpoints with Flask
  2. Integrating React front-ends to back-end APIs
  3. How to do integrate external APIs (object character recognition, google search) into our project
  4. How to debug annoying CSS issues

What's next for FBI (Facts 'bout Ingredients) 💸

Include the impact of the ingredients on your health and the environment, adding an image cropper on the website to crop images of nutrition labels, create mobile app so you can just hover camera over nutrition label

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