Foodies

A web application designed to help out broke and hungry college students

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Inspiration

As our team sat down to brainstorm ideas for our project, we realized that – as huge lovers of food – finding what and where to eat is always problematic. For those who struggle to maintain a sustainable diet each day and those who just want somewhere to eat at 2 AM, we designed this app to offer broke, hungry, and desperate college students all of the information they could ever want on food.

What it does

Foodies allows users to input information about themselves such as weight, height, age, and activity level to calculate how many calories the user should consume a day. Using this information, our application presents options for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks to help the user meet their daily caloric requirements. If they do not enjoy their suggested selections, we allow the user to generate new food items. Once the user is satisfied with their options, they may use our "locate" feature to locate nearby restaurants that offer the selected item.

How I built it

We built our application using the Flask framework, with Python as our backend. We utilized the spoonacular API to gather nutritional information about food items and we also made use of Google's Map API to embed a map into our page that showed the user nearby restaurants. We also made use of extensive web scraping to gather the pictures that are displayed next to each food item.

Challenges I ran into

• Setting up and learning how to use Flask for the first time was difficult • Many CSS attributes and styling aspects were initially obscure • Coming up with an application that was relevant to a personal problem was difficult • Researching which APIs were readily available and free took a long time

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Learned how to use the Flask framework • Utilized what I've learned and applied my knowledge to a real-life application • Found and used some super cool APIs and technologies • Used web scraping to gather images through a Google search query • Built a web application in 24 hours!

What I learned

Through this project, we've learned much about what it's like to work on a team and to be thrown into unknown territory. We learned a new framework, worked with web development, and built a project that we are all very proud of.

What's next for Foodies

We were very ambitious and planned to implement more than what we were able to accomplish. We expect to continue contributing to this project after HackGT, and hope to add more features like nutritional fact checking and meal plan generation. We hope you enjoy our project!

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