FoodSaver

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the growing problem of household food waste, much of which comes from expired groceries sitting unused in fridges and pantries. Families end up not only wasting food but also hundreds of dollars every year, while contributing to unnecessary carbon emissions. We wanted to build something that could help families save money, reduce waste, and encourage sustainable consumption habits in a simple and practical way.

What it does

FoodSaver is a web app that helps users track their groceries and make the most of what they buy. The process is simple: upload a grocery receipt, and the app uses OCR to extract product names and SKU IDs. It then checks against public databases such as OpenFoodFacts to estimate expiry dates based on the purchase date and product type.

Once stored in the user’s dashboard, FoodSaver sends notifications when items are nearing expiry, suggests recipes to make use of those ingredients, and even tracks how much money and CO₂ emissions the user saves by consuming food instead of wasting it. The result is a personal food management system that makes households smarter, greener, and more cost-effective.

How we built it

We started off by finding publicly accessible databases that provide us with food information. We then worked on using the Google Vision API to extract information from the image uploaded and turning it into a blob of code. Then, we parsed this text blob through our database, where it collected and stored the required information. Moving onto the frontend, we had to create our home page, login/sign up pages, and our dashboard. We integrated Firebase Authentication for secure login and sign-ups. We also implemented additional features such as push notifications for expiring food and recipe recommendations powered by third-party APIs.

Frontend: React web app for the user interface.
Backend & Database: Firebase Firestore for storage and Firebase Auth for authentication.
OCR: Tesseract.js / Google Vision API to parse receipt text.
APIs: OpenFoodFacts for product metadata

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting permissions to access public databases from retailers such as Walmart and Costco. We had to build the front end to make it look minimalistic, here, we faced a few issues in UI. Integrating multiple APIs smoothly within the limited timeframe took a lot of trial and error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a full tech stack in 24 hours that links different APIs to solve the issue of people being able to track their food expiry dates. The notification system and the sustainability tracking feature are our proudest accomplishments.

What we learned

This project taught us how to scope and execute a full-stack idea under time constraints. We learned how to deal with messy OCR data, how to structure APIs effectively, and how important clean frontend design is to make a project feel polished.

What's next for FoodSaver

To build and integrate FoodSaver into a mobile app. We want to link it to Google Calendar and integrate an ML model that can take in images and spit out text of those images. We want to expand our database to be able to make the expiry dates more accurate. Creating an option where the user can edit the generated information if they wish to be precise about their food expiry. Overall scaling habits.