Inspiration
A food desert is defined as a place where an area that has limited access to food that is plentiful, affordable, or nutritious. This is not a small phenomenon as over 39 million Americans live in food deserts. These areas are disproportionately in low-income areas (where many people don’t have cars) and rural areas where public transportation is either very limited or unavailable, with supermarkets often many miles away from people’s homes.
What it does
Given a location it will find nearby grocery stores on a map and determine if you live in a food desert. We then provide resources for how to mange living in a food desert.
How we built it
We built it with a frontend in react and a backend in MongoDB. For the map we used APIs from openstreetmaps and maps.co.
Challenges we ran into
The challenges we ran into using MongoDB and using the openstreetmaps. The main and biggest challenge we faced was using MongoDB as none of us have experience in MongoDB. The problems we ran into was setting up the server we were using as at first we couldn't get main server to work so instead we were gonna use a work around and use the community edition. However we realized our mistake, in that we didn't set something for the admin, and went back to the main version to utilize their servers.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of combining a ton of APIs that didn't have a lot of support and needed a lot of work piecing together. We also also proud of finishing the project and demoing.
What we learned
We learned how to use MongoDB for our backend. We had to work around the fact that the US Census API was not working so we had to workaround it by using a csv file in MongoDB.
What's next for Food Desert Finder
We plan on expanding it outside of California to other states.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.