Inspiration

As students, we know the struggle of opening the fridge to random ingredients, and, faced with this hopeless situation, ordering fast food as a quick fix. We wanted to change this desperate situation into a golden opportunity for creativity in the kitchen. Our project idea was born from the idea that students should not have to waste leftover ingredients in their fridge, or waste money on very unhealthy fast food.

What it does

MiNY Crave lets student enter the current ingredients in their fridge, and get recipe suggestions that are based on exactly what they have. It also shows you missing ingredients in case a meal requires just a little more.

How we built it

We built MiNY Crave with Vite React for the frontend, webMD API for all possible ingredient options, and TheMealDB for recipes.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was rate limiting from TheMealDB API, since firing too many requests would return error 429 "Too Many Requests". We worked around that issue by delaying our requests by 750ms, which was our sweet spot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have built a useful tool that even we can use ourselves, and especially proud of pulling off a working demo in such a short time frame.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working with 3rd party APIs under the constraints of CORS, rate limiting, and lack of documentation. We also got a good hang of React thanks to this hackathon.

What's next for MiNY Crave

We'd love to incorporate a proper view for the ingredients' nutritional value, all in the pursuit of having students make convenient and healthy meals.

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