EcoBeans (formerly Cool Beans)

Inspiration

With over 120,000 metric tons of CO2 being produced by food waste and over $1 billion dollars spent every year to manage it in NYC alone, we wanted to create a solution to eliminate food waste as much possible. To do that, we created EcoBeans, an app that lets you take a picture of your groceries, fridge, or pantry, and automatically keep track of their expiration dates.

What it does

Allows you to take pictures of your food and automatically track expiration dates, give you ideas on what to do with your expiring food, and notifies you whenever something is about to go bad.

By leveraging Google Cloud's Vertex AI Platform, we perform advanced object detection and generative tasks that help the user quickly and cheaply reduce their personal food waste.

Challenges

As a team with perhaps a combined total experience of about 4 days creating this type of app, we ran into everything from Python import issues to weird front end behaviour. With time and numerous online tutorials though, we managed to get a working product!