Make My Meal

Inspiration

In the COVID-19 era, the risk of an inefficient shopping experience can be fatal. Retail businesses and their customers need a system that both maximizes safety and optimizes store function. That's why we created Make My Meals, a mobile website that uses smart technology to create a recipe plan to a customer based on an item of their choosing. With the power of pathfinding algorithms, object recognition, and NCR's cloud service, users are provided with the fastest route throughout the store to grab the items that they need and quickly checkout online.

What it does

After a user uploads an image of an item at a grocery store, the application identifies the item and generates relevant recipes that have ingredients available at the current store.
Once a recipe is chosen, the application generates the map of the store which has the shortest path between all of the required ingredients to make the recipe.
Helps merchants maximize store efficiency based on popular user recipes and promotes a safe shopping experience during the pandemic.
Utilizing NCR’s cloud APIs, we can allow retailers to accept contactless, germ-free transactions and bring an online experience to their brick and mortar stores.
By reimagining commerce, we are disrupting the grocery store model by influencing product discovery and managing payments.

Challenges we ran into

Creating an entirely custom pathfinding algorithm and displaying this information on an arbitrary image graph.
It took a little while to completely understand the capabilities of the NCR APIs
Sleep

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a functioning pathfinding algorithm that directed users in a store along the shortest available path
Using object recognition to determine an item from an image
Utilizing NCRs Business Services Platform to not only store item information, but retrieve custom attributes
Creating a visual representation of the store on an arbitrary image graph
Good looking frontend

What's next for Make My Meal

In the future, we hope to also create a portal for merchants to streamline NCR’s APIs. This would allow merchants to log the individual information of each item without having to go through code.
We hope to expand our application to places other than grocery stores like hardware stores (tool ‘recipes’).
Develop an augmented reality system that would allow the user to point their phone in the air to guide them throughout the store.