Grocerify

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  Grocerify's Log In Page

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  Grocerify's Scan Item Feature

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  Grocerify's Find Nearby Charities Feature

Inspiration

Currently, there is a paradox in the world where on one hand, we have the problem of food waste. According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Food Waste Index Report 2021, 1B tonnes of food is wasted globally every year. On the other hand, food insecurity i.e the lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life is a pertinent problem. According to the United Nations, nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020. Furthermore, zero hunger is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, Grocerify aims to tackle this paradox of food waste and food insecurity, as well as contribute to achieving zero hunger by simplifying sustainable grocery shopping and consumption.

What it does

Grocerify is the all-in-one solution that simplifies sustainable grocery shopping and consumption. It includes a grocery list maker, a virtual fridge, a chat forum and a gamified personal accomplishments tracker known as foodie streaks. Grocerify combats food waste and insecurity through three mechanisms: using, swapping and donating items before their expiry date. It encourages the user to use the item before expiry by reminding them of the item with alerts and giving them recipe ideas. The virtual fridge allows the user to see the expiry date, cost and nutritional value of the product. Users can also opt to join chat forums with other Grocerify users to help find them certain groceries, share tips on budgeting or spread awareness about food insecurity. Donating food items is made easy with the database of nearby charities and the donation history log. Furthermore, users are motivated to not let their groceries go to waste with the gamified foodie streaks which track the accomplishments of the user in not letting any grocery items go waste.

How we built it

• Figma for the prototype and mockup of the application
• Canva for the pitch deck
• Unsplash, and plugins on Figma (iconify, flaticon) for images

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was the differences in time zones across the team which resulted in difficulties when deciding when to call to discuss our progress and work on the app. In order to combat this, we used online collaboration tools such as Google Docs to ensure we were all up to date on each other’s work and could comment on potential questions or changes. Furthermore, as all of us came into this hackathon being unfamiliar with Figma, it took us some time to gain a firm understanding of some features when building the prototype such as making the app interactive. To combat this, we utilized the hackathon workshop resources provided by Technova to create the prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the fact that as beginner hackers we:

• Created a prototype of our idea in a short period of time
• Understood each others work ethic and strengths quickly while not having worked as a team prior to this hackathon
• Decided on an idea amidst many creative options for social good
• Helped each other when needed and provided advice to one another on how to improve aspects of the prototype in order to ensure it was successfully completed in a timely manner

What we learned

As beginner hackers, we learnt how to design and create an app prototype on Figma. Apart from developing our research and pitching skills, we also learnt how to work well as a team, collaborate across time zones and manage our workflow.

What's next for Grocerify

We look forward to coding and creating the Grocerify app on the basis of the prototype that we have developed. In the future, we will partner with food banks and charities to increase their reach and expand our database of charities. We would also like to add more features to the app that we were not able to develop due to the paucity of time. We would like to integrate an e-commerce portal into the app which would allow users to shop from their local sustainable grocery stores online. Sustainability is multidimensional. Therefore, we would like to integrate a gamified budget tracker and nutritional intake tracker to make Grocerify the one-stop solution for not only environmentally and socially sustainable grocery shopping and consumption but also financially and nutritionally sustainable consumption!

Built With

• canva
• figma
• google-doc