Foodpedia

Inspiration

Nothing brings people together better than food. In a metropolis like New York City, culture is global, and it’s food is no exception. But what happens when you want to try something new and get that slight anxiety of not knowing if it’s going to be good or not or what it really is? That’s what Foodpedia is for. Certain dishes also hold great importance to many cultures so it doesn’t hurt to educate oneself. Cultural awareness is crucial when it comes to cuisine. Not just for you but many restaurant owners are from immigrant backgrounds. Some are nervous about advertising their dishes, worried some customers might not be interested in their foods due to lack of education. Foodpedia also realizes this and hopes that it can make things easier for such businesses.

What it does

Think Wikipedia, but for food. Want to know where your favorite dish really originated from or how someone discovered the recipe? Enter the item name on Foodpedia to find out. Foodpedia is essentially a database that stores images, ingredients, and cultural history of a particular (ethnic) dish.

How we built it

We utilized Figma to prototype our hack. As this is a figma prototype, there isn’t a working demo. However, to build it, we would most likely use react native to build out the front-end of the app and either Flask or Node.js and Express for back-end functionality. For our database, we would most likely use a NoSQL database management system such as MongoDB or CockroachDB for scalability of Foodpedia.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was which user group to focus on: restaurant owners or customers, as they both can benefit from Foodpedia. Foodpedia helps restaurant owners draw attention to some of the less popular items on their menu, which is oftentimes a result of many customers not understanding the dish and what it consists of. However, we determined that by focusing on the customer and their ease of access, more customers would have the confidence to try new things and understand what they are eating, which would organically drive attention to some less popular menu items in restaurants, thus being a win-win for both demographics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were successfully able to communicate our ideas and thought processes. Despite everyone within the group having different ideas, we were able to navigate it and collectively come together. In addition, our prototype design is visually appealing.

What we learned

User needs and design is just as important as the technical aspects of a project. We also learned how to communicate better and work effectively as a team.

What's next for Foodpedia

Ideally, we would like to take the Figma prototype and turn it into a working prototype. By using React Native for development, we would be able to make an app and a website using the same codebase, which would increase the scalability of Foodpedia and allow more users to access it when they need to.

Built With

• figma