Inspiration
As a college student, it is often difficult to prioritize nutritional health among my other daily responsibilities, whether it be academically, or socially. The last thing on my mind would be how to make different meals throughout the day.
What it does
This struggle would then lead to the formation of the app known as MealMate, the ultimate meal planner that takes care of finding the recipes that best suit your nutritional, time-efficient, budget-friendly needs. MealMate organizes these recipes from breakfast to dinner, for every day of the week, ensuring that know what to cook at what time.
How we built it
Set up a MySQL that takes datasets from the Uber API to create our own database of recipes, and associated grocery stores that contain ingredients, and then creating an algorithm that finds recipes in the database that are the most similar to the the user's preferences, that is captured by user input from our UI, made from Swift. We then use the ingredients database to calculate cost so that we can also provides recipes that are the best match for the user's budget.
Challenges we ran into
The challenges we ran into was creating the databases, trying to match user preferences with the database, requesting access from some APIs, figuring out how to deploy MySQL to Heroku server, and finding out the right APIs to use to create our databases.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making a function that finds the best fit of recipes based on different parameters, such as cost and nutritional value. It then recognizes the best fit to the user's needs by rating the recipe's ability to satisfy the user's needs, and the recipes with the best overall rating is the recipes that get pushed to the top.
What we learned
Learned how to use the Xcode and Swift to design the UI for our app, such as the layout and how the user can interact with the app to provide us with input to feed our algorithm to provide a good recipe match.
What's next for MealMate
Right now, we are focused on the customer base in the Seattle area, as our database only contains stores around this area. The next step would probably be integrating to a larger area of service, most likely other metropolitan areas. Another area of focus would be adding more parameters to create more refined results for the users, such as recipes that adhere to specific diets such as keto diets or paleo diets.
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