MenuChef

Introduction

Looking at our own school cafeteria's we realized that most of the food served is unhealthy and the items not to taste for students are thrown away at the end. Many students also don't eat since some items aren't available on certain days which isn't good for their health either. Furthermore, there is a fixed ratio or size for each food item as a resulted in left overs which were disposed of as well. So we thought of MenuChef, in which every person in the school would be able to choose portion size and type of food. One significant aspect is that it provides a personalized service with privacy. Since a school app is something that each student and parent or guardian has it would be a great choice to form a separate section to make sure both education and health are considered. School food wastage has a deep impact on our environment, a WWF magazine estimates 1.06 billion pounds of food in school cafeterias is wasted each year. [1] Looking at these numbers makes our will to help improve the environment and decrease the amount of food wastage schools produce.

What it does

MenuChef makes sure that no student is left behind, and making food choices easy. When food is wasted, so are the resources used such as water, land, energy, labour and capital. Additionally when waste is disposed it piles up in land fills and affects the land, and produces Green house gases, contributing to climate change [2]. To help lessen the burden on the environment, AI will analyze and understand preferences and portion sizes through a form in a section of the school app. To make this global, ai will conduct a local analysis to verify the menu according to the location of the school. Guidelines will be set by the school health administrator to make sure that the information from the form will be divided properly into what is suitable for students and what isn't. The finalized menu will be posted on the top of the section and since the items will be chosen from overall favorability the students who do not prefer the weekly menu can bring lunch from home. This reduces the amount of waste due to excess production of food. Feedback will be taken weekly about the functionality of the ai and other features will also be present to make sure everyone is satisfied. These features include Meal Plans given to parents for household waste reduction, Digital and Physical Id's generated by ai will be given with a unique student code and a monthly event in which a special dessert is chosen through votes. To make sure the food served is according to regulations, the cafeteria staff will be trained in food and nutrition to make sure all students have a safe and healthy diet.

How we built it

Thinking together, we put our thoughts together in a presentation, before making it a proper one to make sure our idea was set and the thought process was complete. Then we imagined how we wanted to go through with our idea, before creating our website on Google sites. There are four total pages, the first 'Home' page showing our goal and idea benefits. The second page is 'Survey & Menu' in which the survey for the user data is given as well as the current weeks menu statistics. The third page 'AI Generator' showcases the generates menu and gives separate options for Cafeteria Food Card generation and Meal Plan generation so a clear routine is followed in homes too. The last page 'About MenuChef' describes the idea and framework and its importance as well as Responsible AI terms we follow.

Challenges we ran into

There were challenged whilst making the website, not clearly understanding the tools and even mishaps of confusing our idea within itself. There were issues with which font, where should we place a certain textbox and other things. But the important thing is we overcame all of this and built our idea, we made presentations deciding on which template to use, we organized our research whilst discussing it with each other about what was appropriate and what was not.

What we learned

The main lesson of this hackathon we learnt was hard work is what makes you seem capable, what builds you to understand different aspects, different problems and different stories. There are a lot of different types of 'hard work' but when you understand and openly communicate with each other it makes sure everything goes well. We also learnt how food waste heavily effects our surroundings, even the smallest thing like household waste when put together globally is so much waste that it can harm our land and water as well as the climate.

Built With

• canva
• google-docs
• googlesites