HELLO SWIPE

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  Us, when the swipe finally worked!

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  That moment, when the Back-End is working fine!

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  The homepage

Inspiration

Since we ourselves do not use HELLO FRESH, we asked our friends if they use or know someone who uses HELLO FRESH. In the response messages we read a lot about people wanting to try/ eat certain ingredients because they had an appetite for them, but they could not because HELLO FRESH does not allow for “preferred ingredients” to be added to the weekly box. We now knew we found something to put our minds to and built a nice product around!

What it does

HELLO SWIPE offers a solution to three types of customers: For those, who know exactly what kind of cuisine they want, for those, who (also) know exactly what kinds of ingredients they want to cook with in the next week, and for those, who are not sure or are open to surprises. We serve these three kinds of customers by providing a swiping option, which lets people choose their preferred cuisine, a drop-down-menu to let user’s pick the preferred ingredients and a surprise function for people who want to be done with meal planning a bit faster.

How we built it

The project, like any other application, was divided into two parts, the frontend and the backend. For the backend, we made use of Python for handling the algorithm which selects the recipes, along with the Flask framework which establishes the connection between the Front and the Backend. For the frontend, we used the React framework in JavaScript to create user-friendly interactive elements.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge has been the frontend. In order to develop a website from scratch in order to make it simple, yet attractive to the customers is extremely tough. From developing the frontend and integrating it with the backend servers, everything felt like a challenge given the time limit, and our (close to none) prior experience in building applications

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have have been able to successfully create an application which shortlists the users' choice of cuisines, and based on their dietary restrictions along with their preferred ingredients, it displays the (limited number of) available recipes. We built a nice presentation with canva.

What we learned

On the business side of things, we learned that you need to talk to/ ask people you know or ask strangers in person to get a fast response – especially when time is of the essence. Furthermore, you can design very cool presentations with Canva! On the tech side: Front-End, Back-End integration, data transfer, processing & application.

What's next for Hello Swipe

We await integration into HELLO FRESH.... Just kidding but that would be nice. We have a ton of ideas on how we can improve our application. We plan to create better filtering options for the users. Addition of a "Surprise me!" button which displays exciting new recipes to the user which they haven't tried yet, while keeping in mind their dietary restrictions. The frontend can be made even more intuitive and, we can make experience between transitions even more seamless.

Built With

• javascript
• python