Inspiration
Fresh Til' Friday feel passionately about ending the paradox that exists within food distribution. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food is thrown out each year while millions starve. It sits in landfill, releasing methane gas into our atmosphere. It is a global issue but we believe it can be tackled at a grassroots level. We developed this application to enable individuals to be more conscious about the food waste they are producing. We believe that everyone can be a part of a food waste revolution with the right tools.
What it does
The application enables users to keep tabs on the expiration of the food in their kitchen so that they can eat more sustainably. It lets them input their food shop and cross items off the list as they get used up.
How I built it
The application is built on an HTML structure and incorporates CSS for its style and JavaScript for its functionality. We also used Json for data handling during the production phase.
Challenges I ran into
The team had originally hoped to include 'Rekognition' of receipts for inputing data. This is an API available through aws for text recognition from photos. We had planned to use this to enable users to input data by uploading a photo of their receipt and automatically searching our database to find the expiry dates. However, we encountered problems with integrating this into our application and so this was not possible. As it stands, users must either enter their food items and expiry dates manually or search the data base for average expiry dates of foods. In the future, we hope that this issue can be overcome.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are all proud to have completed our first Hackathon and webpage.
What I learned
Our team members learnt a large variety of skills. Ivan learnt JavaScript under pressure during the night and Ines' web design coding came on in leaps and bounds. Overall, we learnt a lot about how to work as a team under such strict time constraints.
What's next for FreshTil'Friday
We aim to produce a mobile app as we feel that it would increase user engagement. FreshTil'Friday is designed to be used as and when it is needed throughout the day. We hypothesises that users would be more likely to engage fully if it was in a convenient web app rather than a website. In addition to this, we aim to develop our web push notifications to prompt users to keep engaging with the app. This version includes basic push notifications but we hope to connect these to features of the website such as "expiring soon" notifications. Such features were difficult to develop in the time frame because it requires more sophisticated front and back-end code. Finally, we also aim to track the contents of the kitchen used each week and those consistently wasted in order to make recommendations for the user's next shopping trip.
