MealWise

Inspiration

Living in an apartment means rooming with people that have different meal plans. Our roommates this year decided to go through the year without meal swipes, and often have trouble creating budgeted meal plans for the week, every week. Seeing our friends struggle with this issue, we decided to put our skills together and try to solve their problem with our project, MealWise.

What it does

MealWise is an application that helps you track and budget your meals and shopping lists using the power of AI. It is a fully customizable shopping list editor that looks up recipes and shows you where you can find the ingredients you need with their prices.

How we built it

We wrote our application in TypeScript with the front end being built in React.js and Next.js. For the back end, we used AWS Lambda to connect to other AWS services, such as AWS Cognito for the sign-in/login pages and AWS DynamoDB to be able to save, delete, and update each user's notes. We used the Google Maps API to find the closest grocery store locations to be able to give the user information about ingredients near them.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to integrate Google Map's API's into our code was quite difficult, as we had little experience working with them, and acquiring these API keys took a bit more time and effort than we expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI came out better than we expected. It is clean and orderly. We were also proud to be able to integrate different types of technology that we have learned about recently together into a single project.

What we learned

We learned how to schedule our times efficiently on a crunch, how to prepare in the future for competitions like this hackathon, how to deal with absurdity and debugging, and a lot about different technologies.

What's next for MealWise

We may want to integrate other stores nearby to get the lowest prices across all of these stores and maybe implement future functionalities such as shelf life.