Fresco

Inspiration

We were inspired by the University's sustainability initiatives and wanted to support that. Instead of focusing on the macro, we wanted to focus on the scale of individual users and give people a way to integrate food waste prevention into their daily lives.

What it does

Fresco is a comprehensive food management system. For prepackaged items, you can scan the barcode and track the expiration date. For items that don't have a barcode, we use AI to recognize what the item is, what kind of storage conditions would allow your food to remain at its best, and an estimation for how long it will last. The app sends you notifications about food that is going to expire, and provides helpful recipes that use those ingredients so that you never have to worry about wasting food again!

How we built it

Fresco is fully built with a SwiftUI frontend and a Swift backend. All API calls are made and subsequently processed with Swift. The full list of APIs we used are the following:

Edamam - for recipe suggestions based on a select number of specific ingredients
Foodvisor - for image recognition of unpackaged food items like fruits and vegetables
Google Gemini - for information about a select product's optimal storage method and average expiry duration
AVFoundation - for barcode scanning of packaged products
Open Food Facts - to extract product name and brand name

Challenges we ran into

LLMs are very inconsistent about their responses. Getting the right information and in the right format took a lot of prompt engineering, and trying a lot of different models.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us had ever worked with Swift or done iOS-specific app development before, so we're proud that we were able to render an entire app in one night.

What we learned

Swift
How much we hate Swift
How to work with LLM APIs
Integrating different APIs and creating a pipeline that feeds data from one part of the app into another

What's next for Fresco

Add suggestions for what to do with expired food: composting locations nearby
Provide excess food that you don't want to use to impoverished areas thus reducing malnourishment
Help include nutrition information about the scanned food for a healthier diet
Expand to add food inventory management capabilities for retailers