Foodsia

Save food and earn credits!

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LINK TO THE DEMO

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gofa1hM9znHIegsSaEPAG3hFzw9e0m1P/view?usp=sharing

Inspiration

Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and the value of this wasted food is worth over $1 trillion. Food waste is a massive market inefficiency, the kind which does not persist in other industries. Meanwhile, 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. That is 1 in 9 people on the planet who are starving or malnourished. Food waste is really, really bad for the environment. Foodsia helps you keep track of your food products and send reminders when something is about to expire. This helps reduce food waste and save our environment!

What it does

The app has a QR code scanner, which scans the QR code on the products or on bills from the supermarket. This QR code will have the name and expiration date of the product. Once the scanning is done, these items will be added to the database and displayed in sorted order, to easily keep track of the items in our pantry/ kitchen. When you buy a product close to the expiration date, some credits will be added to your account which you can redeem later. The app also has a fun quiz which tells you how much food you really waste, this can help you realize and be conscious of your food usage. Also, it has a search page where you can enter the ingredients that you have in your kitchen, so you don't have to search for a recipe only to know that you don't have half of the ingredients at home.

How I built it

This is a React-based app and I used spoonacular API and JSqr for the recipe generator and QR scanner respectively.

Challenges I ran into

I started the hack pretty late after my team fell apart (halfway into the hackathon), so I had to start from scratch and didn't get enough time to implement the complete idea. I also had some trouble sending the query to the API and fetching the response back from it. But after watching a lot of tutorials and scouring over articles on the internet, I somehow managed to do it. I've also tried to implement the credit system but I couldn't handle the data and store it in Firebase properly.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I’m really proud that I finished this app alone and made it (almost) user friendly with a clean UI. Two people reached out to me in the beginning of the hackathon to be my teammates, but they ended up going to a different team. Thus, I was left alone to complete an app by myself. I wasn’t sure if I could do it in the limited time but I am really proud that the app works and I persevered through the challenges I encountered. This was my first time trying to implement a QR code scanner (and making a functional app by myself) and I’m really glad it worked out.

What I learned

I learned a lot about how to handle/ save data in React. Fetch data from API using axios and fetch() in React. Implementation of a QR-code scanner.

What's next for Foodsia

Make a more user-friendly UI. Implement the credit system with user authentication. Partner with restaurants or volunteers to sell food at cheap prices or give them for free (this can be used to help hungry people and reduce malnutrition).

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