Inspiration
Sometimes, finding nutrition information when ordering online is really difficult, and this is an issue for those who are health-conscious and/or have dietary restrictions from allergies or otherwise.
What it does
Our extension scours for nutrition data on the user's behalf and then displays easy-to-parse but important information on the food item like the amount of protein, carbs, fat, and sodium.
How we built it
We built a simple web scraper to grab the information from the website and then we parse this data in a chrome extension to be displayed to the user.
Challenges we ran into
Unlike our previous projects, coming up with an idea was one of our biggest problems. We knew that we wanted to work on either creating APIs or performing web scraping, but we weren't sure what product could implement such a thing. Even after coming up with our idea, we ran into trouble implementing it-- we had planned to be able to grab information for major fast food chains (e.g. Chipotle), but realized going in that doing so would be really difficult since different websites store their nutrition information in different locations, and the formatting is not standardized. Our product for now only works for https://torchystacos.com/.
What we learned
We learned how to create chrome extensions & how to perform basic web scraping.
What's next for Food Scrapes
For the future, we want to expand the nutrition scraping to more restaurants, especially in the Austin area. We also want to include more nutrition information, especially related to allergens.
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