Nourify

Inspiration

Nourify was created from our team’s collaborative dream of building an efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective grocery shopping software. As online shipping fees scale up, many are forced to buy extra goods to meet free shipping minimums. As delivery services like UberEats gain popularity, the greater the environment is harmed due to excess driven deliveries. In our prospective roles as students wanting to eat healthy to avoid our freshmen 15 or as environmentalists urging for positive technology innovations for the planet, we present to you the project from our dreams – Nourify.

What it does

Three words: Simplify. Sustainify. Nourify. Our project surrounds the concept of offering users a small money-making opportunity by completing a request to buy a certain product from the grocery store. Users wanting to make deliveries are prompted to state their starting location and ending destinations and Nourify will reveal requests from users needing groceries delivered that are within a one mile radius of the delivery user’s location. We simplify the grocery buying process by turning it into a friendly, community activity. Then, delivery users would accept requests and drop by the designated exchange location. This reduces the pollution of the receiver needing to travel to the store for such items at a later time, sustainifying this process. Nourify’s image-to-text AI implementations confirm purchases by a photo of the receipt and – it’s done! The receiving user pays for their requested goods and a small delivery fee, almost as if the delivery user did a quick favor for them. We Nourify bodies with healthy food, Nourify connections within the community, and Nourify the environment with this eco-friendly approach.

How we built it

Nourify functions with Python backend code and HTML designed UI. We designated different parts of the project including the database, receipt scanner, etc. Using Ollama API, we were able to implement our proximity radius to detect how close the delivery users and requesting users were to each other. The project is supported by a grocery store catalog that collects information from grocery store web pages with WebCrawler.

Challenges we ran into

We experienced a lot of issues getting a web crawler to properly scrape store websites. An issue that we struggled with for over 5 hours was how resizing a window would impact the number of pages that Trader Joes would include to present their products on the website. We were trying to debug confusing errors due to not recognizing that our half-screen window was constantly changing the output.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our functioning image-to-text scanner that can read receipt information and translate it into String and binary data for Ollama API. Having struggled with the grocery catalog from stores for so long, we are also very satisfied with its current functionality.

What we learned

Nourify has expanded our understanding of the extreme difficulty of technology liabilities as we’ve run into many bottlenecks of privacy invasion and liability. We have discussed using third-party-payment methods to guarantee that the delivery user is paid and implementing a rating system to guarantee the trustworthiness of delivery users. Of course, there were many learning opportunities in this complicated software, yet, figuring out how to manage these security problems was definitely a learning experience for our entire team.

What's next for Nourify

Nourify is more than a grocery delivery software, it can solve problems across communities.

We plan to go beyond groceries and begin exploring delivery options across all genres. A delivery user could be dropping off a laptop that a receiving user forgot to bring on their way to work. A college student could request a delivery for a calculator to give to their friend across campus in need of one for a test. Building off on the idea of convenience, both time and pollution can be reduced if our community began to participate in these favors.