Food Hack

The healthiest, cheapest, and trendiest recipes at the click of a button.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by being college students. It's not easy to eat healthy, especially when healthy foods are so expensive!

What it does

The user enters a combination of nutritional facts, and our app returns the cheapest recipes that meet those requirements. We also rate the foods by "trendiness". Using sentiment analysis via a pretrained machine learning model, we are able to judge overall reviews of the recipes based on what people are saying on Twitter.

How we built it

We built it with a Node.js/Express Backend and a vanilla javascript frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues regarding how to filter through all the recipe entries and how to analyze sentiment on twitter for each one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are just proud that we finished our app! A good portion of our team are first time hackers.

What we learned

We learned that vanilla js is hard! DOM manipulation is actually quite tedious without all those fancy libraries.

What's next for Food Hack

We hope to turn our algorithm for finding the cheapest foods into a linear programming problem / optimization question in the future. In this manner it would be more efficient to find the cheapest foods. Perhaps in the future the app could be expanded into a "quick eats" delivery service or a monthly subscription where foods are delivered to your door. Another extension might be adding user account/profile and using AI algorithm to predict and recommend optimal nutrition facts based on user profile and nutritional needs.

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