Inspiration
Have you ever been in this situation where you are trying to get the last bit of peanut butter out of a jar, but your knife just isn't getting it all out? We just end up with peanut butter on our knuckles, and the jar gets thrown away. Situations like this, where leftover food scraps are tossed out, contribute to the fact that over forty percent of food is uneaten in the United States. To combat this issue, we created FoodMatters!, a website that provides recipes for using every last bit of food and expired foods in order to eliminate food waste.
Development
We first created a chat bot using GupShup that interacts with the user and asks them what kind of food they want to use. So far, the categories include Condiments, Dairy, Snacks, Bakery, and Produce. After navigating to a specific food item, it will direct the user to a recipe for using up the last bits of food. We implemented this FoodBot into a website using HTML/CSS, Nodes.js, and Heroku. On the website, we currently have a homepage, Q & A page, and an About page.
Future Directions
Currently, the recipes are manually found and linked to our FoodBot. In the future, we hope to be able to programmatically retrieve recipes and store them in a database, from which the user can search and browse through. Additionally, we want to create a space where users can comment and input their personal tips and tricks to make the site more interactive. We also hope to develop a mobile platform.
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