Food for Zot

User dashboard

Inspiration

We all go grocery shopping every week, and we agreed that there isn't a good way to keep track of what groceries we need and where the best place to buy them is. So, we decided to address this need and create a tool ourselves.

What it does

Food for Zot acts as a comprehensive dashboard for all things related to grocery shopping. Features include adding and removing items from a grocery list, managing a collection of recipes whose ingredients can be conveniently added to the shopping list, searching through various grocery store catalogs for the lowest prices with help from Google Gemini AI, and more!

How we built it

The application is built using the Next.js framework, with React for the front-end and Flask/Python for backend integration with a Firestore database, which houses the data. Additionally, we used the Google Gemini API for enhanced ingredient searching, and Open price engine API for the price comparison feature.

Challenges we ran into

At first we thought of doing price comparison by web scraping, but this turned out to be difficult. Instead, we pivoted towards using an API, which works much better.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI is very intuitive and allows for convenient use
Grocery and Recipe lists are easy to manage
Gemini AI is seamlessly integrated into the website

What we learned

We got a better appreciation for the complex web development process and the sorts of coordination that needs to take place between the frontend and backend teams.