Instant Yummy

Cooking made easier for years to come..

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Inspiration

For most of us we're fortunate to live with families who cooked for us. Because of this, we never got much of a chance to learn to cook for ourselves as university students. Over the course of the pandemic, with the lack of outdoor activities a lot of our generation is turning to cook as a hobby and to help our parents at home. But with the increasing difficulty of social distancing in groceries, getting ingredients can sometimes be a big discouraging hassle when starting to learn cooking.

What it does

InstantYummy is a unique recipe app that takes into account students pantries and refrigerators long before cooking. It enables students to be more flexible by logging in their ingredients when they're free, so once they have to make time to cook, it takes away the need to check different cupboards and shelves, to figure out whats around the kitchen when cooking.

We also use a different ranking algorithm than most apps, defaulting to quick, short and easy recipes while ensuring quality. This helps balance the difficulty of recipes and maintains our spot as an entry point for beginners. Our goal is to help students nail the basics without losing motivation from their own ingredients and have fun while cooking!!

How we built it

We created the app using android studio to make the app's layout, features and components such as the toolbar, buttons, sliding animations, etc. To match the user pantry with recommended recipes, we created a unique partial matching algorithm. All the algorithms used and back-end connections that were made to our app features were programmed using Java.

Challenges we ran into

  • Importing our recipe dataset was a major problem as the dataset did not conform to android file standards and led the app to malfunction numerous times. Hence, as a team, we created a python script to change all image names to android file standards. Making this script automated the entire process of changing file names, hence it saved us a lot of time throughout the hackathon.

  • Getting app features to be placed accordingly in XML and be relative to other parts of the app

  • Unfamiliar syntax was a problem that led us to learn android studio and how it coordinates with Java

  • Time constraints throughout the hackathon were one of many challenges we faced. In the beginning, we had put too much time into planning and not programming the app which led us to program faster and made us prone to more errors in code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Opening up to share ideas to create a unique solution
  • Doing user and market research before proceeding with the implementation
  • Learning to get scrappy and pivot the product features to meet project deadlines

What we learned

  • Learning how to create a partial ingredient matching algorithm that takes into account ease of access of certain ingredients, how many ingredients a recipe has, and how many missing ingredients there are compared to the current pantry

  • Using Parse SDK and databases, we learned how to make user ingredients and preferences for vegetarian/partial ingredient matching persists across user account onto any device

  • Learned how to create various components and features of an app in android studio such as a custom sliding animation when transitioning between tabs using nav controller, bottom navigation bar, and nav graph actions

What's next for Instant Yummy

  • Make Instant Yummy multilingual for better accessibility (importing APIs)
  • More options of cultural food for users (expanding our dataset)
  • A cooking feed where users can like, support and post recipes of what they made
  • A separate platform where users can also buy missing ingredients from their pantry
  • A built-in camera that scans what you have in your fridge or in stock and records them to the app
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