MealBuddy

MealBuddy Logo

Inspiration

Around 119 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States each year. Our project works towards reducing this problem. Initially, our ideas were to create budget friendly meal prep plans in order to increase access to healthy, cost-effective options or creating a community based social app for people to help their neighbors. We decided to combine the two ideas. MealBuddies is a fantastic social community platform that allows you to connect with your neighbors and either request or exchange ingredients that you already have in your pantry. This way, you not only reduce food waste, but also create a supportive network where everyone benefits from each other's surplus. MealBuddies is revolutionizing the way we approach food sharing and making a real impact on reducing food waste in our communities.

What it does

Connect with your neighbors: MealBuddies allows you to connect with your local community and build relationships with your neighbors. Request or exchange ingredients: If you find yourself in need of specific ingredients for a meal, you can post a request on MealBuddies. Your neighbors who have those ingredients can offer them to you, ensuring that unused items in their pantries find a purpose. Share your surplus: On the flip side, if you have excess ingredients sitting in your pantry, you can list them on MealBuddies and offer them to your neighbors who might need them. Gain donation credits: Gain donation credits from these excess surplus by exchanging it at a low price to send to your favorite charity cause. Reduce food waste: By facilitating ingredient exchanges within the community, MealBuddies helps reduce the amount of food wasted. It promotes a culture of sharing and ensures that edible items are put to good use rather than being thrown away.

How we built it

We built the backend using Node.js and Express, and stored the data in a Mongo Database. For the frontend, we utilized React to create an interactive user interface that enhances the user experience.

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges with our project, such as implementing Google map geolocation APIs and figuring out how to use databases within our website. We also had troubles with our github and updating our code. Additionally, there were some errors we didn’t know how to tackle since we didn’t have much experience with javascript. We didn't have time to implement the front end, so we had to use https://github.com/ed-roh/mern-social-media front end. (this is copyright free).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were very happy at the end when we were able to come up with a project. Even though we didn’t achieve our initial goal of creating a web app with the user's location and a translation system, we learnt a lot about web development and building a database.

What we learned

We learned a lot about databases and how to implement them within a web application. We also learned about what goes into building a website and UI/UX design. We also learned the MERN stack. Before we did not know what goes into building a full stack application but this experience has helped us

What's next for MealBuddies

We want to implement a safer database, transaction protocols, geolocation, and a leaderboard system and displaying individual points based on their donations. We also want to implement our own front end since we didn't have the chance to in the short 24 hours. Our project didn't get as far as we has hoped, but we’re looking forward to implementing more in the future.