Meat by Receipt

Do you know how much meat you eat? Did you know that meat consumption must fall by 75% for a sustainable future? Use Meat by Receipt to track how much you eat effortlessly: just by scanning receipts!

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Inspiration

*Meat consumption is one of the biggest drivers of climate change
*There's no easy way to keep track of our individual meat consumption over time
*This inspired us to create an app that would allow users to easily keep track of their meat consumption.

What it does

*You take and upload pictures of your shopping receipts
*Shows you your meat consumption each week and how it changed from the previous 2 weeks
*Keeps track of your targeted meat consumption weight

How we built it

Google OCR: used to extract ID and text from the receipts
Google Virtual Machine: used to host the backend server
Redcircle API: used to extract information about price, ID meat, and weight from ID of the meat
Swift: Front end
Flask + beautifulsoup: For backend and web scraping
Figma: Collaborative interface design for the app and backend

Challenges we ran into

*We don't have any target receipts on us that had meats, so we had to construct our own target receipt that has meats to demonstrate that our app works. In addition, we were limited by multiple restraints on package dependencies which wasted a lot of our time. Our current app also works on only Tagrt receipts as we're using the Target API. We hope to expand as detailed below.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing the project under the given time frame and incorporating OCR to have an accurate receipt meat weight finder using our sample receipts.

What we learned

Using Google OCR and Google Cloud, as well as interacting with the Target API to give us reproducible results was not an easy solution to come to.

What's next for Meat by Receipt

*Scale our app to other popular grocery stores other than Target such as Walmart, Walgreens, etc. We are also hoping to eventually be store-independent and have our app work for any kind of store.
*Convert our app into a full-on health + nutrition app with a sustainability focus, which will be quite different from an app just focused on sustainability. We aim to provide our users with a health app that has the benefits of sustainability, with the sustainability components actually being our USP
*Calculating and showing the user more statistics on their health, nutrition, as well as their meat consumption, and how far they've come along since they started using our app

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