FridgeScrape

FridgeScrape landing page
Recipe URLs after entering list
Recipe page example (from spoonacular)

Inspiration

According to the USDA, the accumulated food waste in 2021 contributed to 170 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the annual emissions of 42 coal power plants (Buzby 2022). With the technologies that we have today such as APIs that can give us recipes, why not tackle this issue at the forefront and help mitigate the food waste?

What it does

FridgeScrape is a quick an easy way to find what you can make with the ingredients you have. The way it works is the user enters a list of ingredients they want to utilize and 5 recipes will be returned based on the ingredients you have. These 5 recipes are prioritized by how many ingredients you are missing (less missing = more priority). All recipes are URLs that link to a website that includes the recipe's ingredients w/ amounts, step by step instructions, time, and equipment needed.

While other websites exists that are able to give recipes based on ingredients, what makes FridgeScrape unique is efficiency. Many of these websites can be overwhelming trying to find certain ingredients and figuring out how to use it, which is why I wanted to build something simple while still maintaining effectiveness.

How we built it

This website was built using React and the spoonacular API.

The first step was creating the HTML/CSS wireframe
The second step was creating functions for API calls.
The final step was implementing the logic to use the API and ensuring the web app worked

Challenges we ran into

There were a few styling issues in the beginning/finding inspiration for the design
A few issues getting the logic correct for the recipes to render
spoonacular API has a cap on how many requests you can make to their server unless you pay :(