ShelfSaver

A website that connects local supermarkets that are selling discounted excess produce to buyers to reduce food waste!

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Inspiration

We were inspired by an existing mobile app called Too Good to Go and sought to create a website with a similar premise- to encourage users to help reduce food waste on a larger scale through discounted groceries.

What it does

ShelfSaver is a website that allows users, to query a database of grocery items being sold by registered supermarkets at discounted prices due to being no longer fresh in order to encourage sustainable eating and discourage food waste. Sellers can add, edit, and remove items in the database while buyers can add, edit, and remove items in their own shopping cart. The fantasy element is integrated into the web app primarily through its UI, immersing the user into a magical grocery-shopping adventure.

How we built it

ShelfSaver uses Spring Boot for the backend and React for the frontend!

Challenges we ran into

We spend the first couple of hours of the hackathon attempting to troubleshoot working collaboratively in our local repositories using the same MongoDB cluster. We ultimately decided to heed the advice of a mentor and adapt our project to use a different database source instead so that we could prioritize our time for more notable tasks in the development process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our very first hackathon for every member of our team, so we are proud that we were able to address issues and adapt accordingly, such as converting the project from initially using a MongoDB database to a MySQL database. We are also proud of using principles that we learned from courses we have taken at university and applying those skills to this project!

What we learned

We learned how to connect the backend of a web app to the frontend without having a web development framework to hold our hands through the process! Our main goal for this hackathon was primarily to learn new skills, such as learning how to make RESTful APIs using Spring Boot specifically, which we certainly fulfilled thanks to this hackathon.

What's next for ShelfSaver

We think that it would be very interesting to implement LLMs and artificial intelligence into this project in the future- an idea that we had during the brainstorming phase but were unable to implement due to time constaints.

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