FoodGrub

Inspiration

After attending the first State Farm workshop introducing the challenge, our team decided that we wanted to make a tangible impact and improve lives in a relevant, practical manner. We looked at different problems, particularly ones that college students like us frequently face, and saw that food topped the list. Because preparing food is time-consuming and hard to do along with a busy class and/or work schedule, we hoped to make the process easier and faster with this project. The name of the project is a spin-off version of GrubHub that focuses on the nutritional (food) aspect that forms the foundation of our idea.

What it does

The project determines possible recipes from a list of ingredients.

How we built it

React was the basis of our project.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, our team was incomplete, so the original members had to recruit and find more, which they did at the First Time Hackers workshop the first night. After everyone joined, however, we lacked focus to commit to one challenge because we didn't know what to exactly do for a project. We eventually narrowed it down to the State Farm challenge because we felt that it gave us enough space for flexibility and creativity. The majority of our team also had limited familiarity with software/hardware, so fleshing out the project was difficult. However, we used tutorials extensively to address this gap to make progress when we encountered errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to have a full team of four, and we actually submitted a project rather than staying as a passive participant in side events and workshops.

What we learned

Through self-learning and events, we became more familiar with React, Databases, and Git (collaborative coding, branches, forks, and other related topics) and gained more skills and knowledge in software development (front and back-end) that we can apply to future projects at hackathons, similar competitions, and the like.

What's next for FoodGrub

We would like to make our project a fully-functioning app available on the App Store and Google Play so that the app reaches a larger audience and brings benefit to a larger segment of the population. We hope for the app to be user-friendly with intuitive features to lessen the burden of anxiety and time management for meal preparation.