MealBuddies

MealBuddies centralizes food resources to make food security more accessible.

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Inspiration

Food security and food access is a growing concern for many in Yolo County. Although there are many organizations that provide food, it is difficult to find what services are available. According to the U.S Census Bureau, one of six Yolo County residents is food insecure.

COVID-19 has made it even more difficult for people to receive support. Hitting low-income households the hardest, people are in need of accessible food resources more than ever.

MealBuddies envisions the way that people in need of food can find resources and access to food. Focused on providing resources that best meet individual needs.

What it does

MealBuddies is a web-app that provides information to different types of food services that best meet individual needs.

Our online community connects people to local events that offer services and food to those who need it. Our website service allows community organizations and restaurants to provide food. We maintain and update the MealBuddies database with different food providers. Our purpose is to connect people to find a meal a day, so they find food pantries and any local pantry that offers free meals.

How we built it

MealBuddies was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Edamam Recipe API, Firebase Realtime Database and Firebase Storage. We utilized NodeJS to establish connections between client and server. MealBuddies fetches information from our FirebaseDatabase to create dynamically updated cards that our users can interact with. MealBuddies also offers resources such as meal ingredients and recipes.

We built the UI on Figma; we started sketching on hand to how the UI would look like. Following with wireframing every pace and the user journey. We were able to successfully implement features into the MealBuddies demo.

Challenges we ran into

Our team’s backend developers were new to server side communication which delayed our database creation. Despite that, as a team, we all worked together on aspects that we were skilled at. This allowed for the completion of MealBuddies.

We spent more of our time conducting user research than we had originally planned. Even though we were behind on schedule, all the time spent on research gave us a clear idea of how we envisioned MealBuddies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Before starting to code we conducted user research to have a better idea of our user target, discussed together on making MealBuddies an interactive product with user research that we conducted. Before we started with the project we came up with branding targets
  • Making use of new technologies, specially the Google Cloud Platform.
  • Using wireframes to better understand the user interaction and how to display our content to best fit the needs of our users.

What we learned

  • How to perform user-focused research
  • How to work collaboratively through GitHub
  • How to host a dynamic web application
  • How to use Firebase for web storage

What's next for MealBuddies

In the future, we would want to:

  • Improve the UI/UX through user testing
  • Have mobile & tablet breakpoints
  • Expand recipe database
  • Search and filter for locations
  • Sort based on distance from current location
  • Have user sign-in for bookmarking functionality
  • Introduce additional resources such as a newsletter
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