Meliora

Company Logo
Splash Screen Logo
Home Screen
Add Item/Barcode
Add Item/ Expiration Date
Item Confirmation
Item Edit

Inspiration

We were inspired by the fact there there is 133 billion pound of uneaten food supply amounting to loss of estimated total of $161.6 billion per year according to a report summary from the Economic Research Service (Buzby, Jean C., Hodan F. Wells, and Jeffrey Hyman. The Estimated Amount, Value, and Calories of Postharvest Food Losses at the Retail and Consumer Levels in the United States, EIB-121, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, February 2014).

What it does

To reduce the amount of food wasted we envisioned a simple and easy to use application where the users get a sense of achievement by reducing the amount of products that get wasted. The application addresses the fact that a lot of this food is wasted due to the product expiration date passing and addresses it by reminding the users to consume the items before its expiry by simple push notifications. Using our Android application the user can simply click a picture of the item's barcode and expiry date which will automatically add the name of the product and its expiry to the database while also having support to manually enter the details in case things go wrong.

The success of our app is achieved though minimizing the need of manual input from the user. All of this is supported by the usage of Firestore which is a highly scalable cloud solution and is responsive to changes made by users in near-real time. The app embraces simplistic user interface. It only does what it is indented to do. Our future iterations will focus on predicting user behavior in order to help people be less prone to wasteful consumption

How we built it

We built it using the following technologies:

Android studio to code (Java)
Git to collaborate for code
Google's ML Kit for Barcode Scanning and Text Image recognition
Firebase Firestore to store items for each user
Firebase Auth for quick SignIn using google
Canva for logo creation
Facebook group calls and chats for communicating with each other. :)

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging since out of four only two members knew the Android platform well and others had to pick it up. We were in different time zones so had challenges collaborating and debugging a lot of compiler errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We could communicate well during this time and have our MVP ready to demo.
Not only the features work but we could also make sure the product looks good from UI/UX perspective.
Utilized latest machine learning kit for text recognition in images.

What we learned

To use all these awesome API's and how to collaborate efficiently.
Best practices for UI

What's next for Meliora

Push notifications synced with Firestore to help users track their food waste behaviors on the fly
Predictive ML model to reduce wasteful consumption based on what items were made use of vs wasted
Analysis per user on their Dashboard stating how much food and how many dollars they saved this month.
The UI/UX to be further improved.