Food Steward

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  Generated List of Foods

Inspiration

This past summer one of our team members studied abroad in Guatemala where food waste is an important issue. She lived with a host family where they did not want to waste food as there are starving people in the country. Her host mom would make a weekly trip to the local market for fresh produce and would only purchase with the family could eat. Upon her return to the US, she realized how much food waste occurs in the US and wanted to help prevent food waste. Our hack is designed to achieve this goal of reducing food waste through innovative solutions.

What it does

Our app allows users to record their food purchases, and stores a log of all food owned by the user. The app records the expiration dates for each item and reminds the user when those dates are approaching. Finally, the app connects to link to suggest delicious recipes for food that is close to expiration!

How we built it

We used Android Studio to build the framework for out application, which runs on all android devices. We populated a list of food expiration dates from a few databases from which our program draws.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges of hackathons are universal, and this hack was no exception. Coordinating teamwork and divvying up responsibilities was a struggle that we had to work together to overcome. Organization and team management had to be a priority in order to succeed at this hack. Additionally, overreaching on our hack was a problem; 24 hours was simply not enough time to accomplish every feature we wanted for this to be a perfect product, and one of the challenges was coming to terms with that and deciding which features took priority.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of designing an app which will have positive social impact by reducing food waste. Each of us have had food expire without a chance to use it, and know that this is not only a monetary drain, but also a fundamental societal waste. We are proud to have made an app that offers a solution to this problem, and also helps us discover unique recipes using a variety of ingredients!

What we learned

We learned uncountably many new skills from this hackathon. From team management, to working on a deadline, to learning features of android studio, our team walked away with more than we started because of our time working on Food Steward. We are excited to take the skills we learned here and apply them to the development of this app in the future, and to other projects/hacks!

What's next for Food Steward

We envision a future where Food Steward is implemented with Internet of Things functionality to connect on more sophisticated levels with your devices. Imagine your fridge automatically tracking the objects you purchased and their expiration dates, or an RFID scanner being implemented for usage in stores to log your grocery purchases. Another feasibly idea is to allow direct transfer of grocery purchases from receipts to the app via photo. Regardless, there are a wide variety of potential future applications for Food Steward.

Built With

• android-studio