Inspiration
Despite Singaporeans' love for food, households are one of the largest generators of food waste, contributing around half of the food waste generated in Singapore. Amongst the waste, rice, noodles and bread were among the most commonly wasted food items, alongside many other common culinary ingredients one might find in an everyday supermarket.
Our project was inspired by one of our teammate's friends, who frequently brought dishes cooked by her mum to share amongst friends at the end of the week. These dishes were not a typical home-cooked meal - They were cooked using whatever leftover ingredients were left in the fridge before her family's weekly grocery run at the start of the week. As a result, these dishes were always special and unique, as it depended on what combination of ingredients was left.
This got us thinking - Must near-expired food really be thrown away? Why not change our perspective and turn what most people will bin, into new and innovative recipes that can feed a few more mouths?
What it does
Our web application is our team's solution to tackling food waste. It has 2 main features.
The main feature, Search By Ingredient, allows users to search for recipes using ingredients they have in their fridge. Under the Search tab, users can search for a recipe by ingredient. For example, when the user searches for "Chicken", a list of recipes with chicken as the main ingredient to show. The user can then click under the Recipe tab to search for this recipe, to see the list of ingredients needed, as well as the step-by-step process. Recipes on our web application include many local delights such as Nasi Lemak and Laksa, as well as dishes from other cuisines.
The second feature, Donate, allows users to submit requests to donate food or ingredients at home. Users fill in a form with their Full Name, Mobile Number, Email Address, Select the Food Type of their donation, a brief description, the remaining shelf life of the donation, as well as his/her region. After the form is submitted, an email will be sent to one of our team members notifying us of a new donation request.
In the future, we hope to expand this feature to allow nearby users to collect these food donations, promoting communal spirit for reducing food waster as well.
How we built it
We used ReactJS, HTML, CSS and JS to build the prototype of our website.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many technical challenges, particularly as this is a short 24-hour hackathon. Some particular challenges are to do with configurations as our team is quite new to building web applications, and we struggled with React.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Given the short time span, our team is truly proud of this website we have built. There certainly are many more features we can add, but the core features we have conceptualized have been built.
What we learned
LifeHack is truly an amazing experience as it gives our team the opportunity to tackle the real world’s problems by providing a digital solution. Our team is now more aware of these real issues and how a simple solution may benefit people all over the world, and this is also possible due to the interesting lineup of workshops that were prepared for us.
What's next for Nice To Meat You!
Our team had many ideas on how to bring Nice To Meat You to greater heights. Due to time constraints, we were only able to implement the two core features in our working prototype.
Nonetheless, the next feature we want to develop involves using AI to allow users to take a picture of their fridge, and have the system analyse what ingredients or foodstuff is in the image. The user can then search for recipes by simply taking a photo of their fridge.
Currently, the rough implementation is done and the camera is set up, however, the model and data being fed in is still too simple. We will continue working on this feature in the hopes of showing the panel of judges on the 16th of July!
Built With
- css
- email.js
- html
- javascript
- react
- sass
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