Recipe Dash

A web application that builds your shopping cart from recipe links.

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Inspiration

How easy would it be to just enter in a recipe and have your shopping basket generated with all the ingredients you need? We were inspired to figure out ways to streamline shopping experiences.

What it does

Our application used the NCR API to build your grocery list and shopping basket from online recipe links. It estimates the quantities of items you'll need based on the measurements in the recipe. Based on the estimations, it calculates the total price of the items in your basket.

How we built it

We used node.js to host our server in order to interact with the NCR server and manipulate data. We used the NCR Catalog API to get a catalog of items as well as the following properties - name, descriptions, prices, and item identification numbers. We used cheerio to scrape the ingredient information (quantity, unit, ingredient name) from the passed in recipe urls. With the scrapped information, we matched the ingredients to the items in the NCR Catalog API. Our application was built using JavaScript, HTML & CSS.

Challenges we ran into

  • We were hindered by the limited product information in the NCR API. It would have been helpful to have information such as weights of the food items to accurately calculate food quantities and a greater sample size (there was no baking powder!) .
  • It was difficult to extract the recipe information from different recipe links because of the variance in formatting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We built something that can change the way that people currently shop for groceries
  • The UI is beautiful
  • We worked really well together and survived HackGT

What we learned

We used an API that were unfamiliar with and got some practice with REGEX. We also learned how to make searches more accurate.

What's next for Recipe Dash

We hope to expand Recipe Dash so that recipes from any website can be used to optimize the search for ingredients and also be mapped to actual grocery store inventories.

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