Food Saver

Food Saver is an app that minimizes food waste by keeping track of and notifying users when their groceries will expire.

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Inspiration

We were inspired to create this app to address the issue of food waste in the US. According to the USDA, 30-40% of all food in America is wasted. Approximately 108 billion pounds of food is wasted each year, which equates to over $161 billion worth of food being thrown away.

What it does

Food Saver makes it easy to It keeps track of all of the food you have so that none of it goes to waste. Our app manages the expiration dates of your groceries and sends a push notifications to indicate when foods are about to go bad, reminding the user to consume the food before it has to be thrown away.

How we built it

We built Food Saver using Android Studio, Dart, and the Flutter Framework. We also used Google Firebase to store data and Google Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from the Google Cloud ML library to extract data from images, giving the app the ability to read receipts.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was time. We weren't able to implement a lot of our ideas, like certain UI/UX features, because of the time constraint. Learning Flutter was also a challenge, since 3/4 of our team members were new to this software development kit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing the REGEX expressions to parse the raw OCR output was a massive accomplishment. The OCR in itself is a massive accomplishment considering nobody on the team had prior experience. We are proud that the app successfully stores the information found using the OCR into a Google Firebase database, fetching expiration information about general expiry of specific grocery foods from another sheet in our Google Firebase database. We have iOS and PWA binaries, making our app cross-platform.

What we learned

We learned that making apps is really hard and takes a lot of time, effort, and creativity. Also, parsing data with OCR is extremely finicky and takes a lot of time and effort to get right.

What's next for Food Saver

We have lots of ideas about how we want to beautify the UI and improve the UX, such as adding swiping functionality to delete eaten items and a large dashboard displaying only foods that will expire this week in order to keep the design clean and simple. We want Food Saver to be an all-in-one app for meal planning. In the future, we would like to add a widget for users to be able to keep grocery lists within the app, as well as a page containing recipe suggestions which use ingredients currently in the user's kitchen. Educational information could also be added to Food Saver, including food storage suggestions so that the user gets the most longevity from their groceries. We would also like to pre-process images before applying OCR to improve results, add more food expiration data to the database, and rent or find a machine running macOS to build and publish the iOS binary.

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