Hot Foods

Do you get stuck figuring out what to eat on campus? Do you love randomly swiping when you're bored? You need Hot Foods! Hot foods is a tinder style application for choosing dining options on campus.

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Inspiration

We were tired of trying to figure out what to eat on campus so we wanted to build an app to give intelligent recommendations for food options. Our group members have also all had issues with allergens on campus not being disclosed when they’re present, so we knew that we wanted to track allergens in the food options and be able to get accurate and up to date nutrition and allergen information.

What it does

Hot Foods is a dating app style swiping app that allows users to rate foods and get custom intelligent recommendations powered by machine learning.

In rating mode, Hot Foods allows users to swipe left and right on foods to increase or decrease their preference. In ordering mode, it provides those intelligent recommendations for users to either swipe right to add to cart or swipe left for more intelligent machine learning powered recommendations.

Hot Foods also allows users to swipe up on each food option to see all the nutritional and allergen information grabbed directly from RIT’s Net Nutrition. Net Nutrition is a resource that provides updated allergen information about daily menu items from RIT Dining Locations. This information is updated every day to provide users with accurate information on all the currently available food options with the current recipes and allergens included.

NetNutrition is not a well known resource among the RIT community, so we wanted to use it as a database to show how powerful it can be for students, whether they have allergies or just want to make more informed choices about their health and diet.

How we built it

We used PostgreSQL for our database, Java’s SpringBoot for our backend, Flutter and Dart for our front end, Docker for containerization, and Figma and Illustrator for design. We started by planning out our endpoints as a team and then we split up into working on frontend, backend, and design. While the developers set up the backend, the designer worked on creating a mockup. The web scraping for NetNutrition took significantly longer than we anticipated and loading all of the data into the database ended up taking around 2 hours due to inefficient scraping and the amount of data we are using.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was getting web scraping to work consistently and produce the data we need. Net Nutrition is pretty unreliable and dropped a few times as well as loading very slowly causing a lot of attempted scraping to be stopped. We also ran into a few issues with items not containing full data which threw off our front-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of how much work we’ve put into this project. We are also very proud of how much fun we had with this project because at the end of the day that was our main goal. We are very proud of our Flutter frontend and how responsive and fluid it feels navigating through it. We learned a lot and we had fun.

What we learned

One of the main concepts we learned during this hackathon was using AI. We’ve never made a project using AI, so learning more about it and seeing how we could implement it into our project was pretty exciting.

What's next for Hot Foods

In the future, we want to alert users when an ingredient changes in a menu item. There have been times when ingredients will change at RIT Dining locations and a new allergen is added. RIT Dining does not notify students when that happens, which can be dangerous to students who have intense allergies. With a notification system, we want Hot Foods to alert users when any allergens or intolerances are added or removed.

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