Inspiration
The inspiration for this project was when I was living with my roommates and the food we had bought and punched to the back to make space had been neglected. Or we could accidentally buy multiple of the same type of food because no one was sure of what we had at home. To reduce the waste that the common person uses (billions of us) we can make simple changes to ensure that we can consume our food effectively.
What it does
An application that takes in a login would be associated with one fridge which we keep in a cloud database. Then when logging in or creating an account we would access the information associated with the account. Then the user can add food items when they do their groceries and add the expiration dates. When the dates close, the app warns the users with color alerts. Then when the app is very close to expiration we color alert again and encourage the user to use this item by providing them with recipes that contain this item.
How we built it
We built it using Flutter! We used this application and coded in Dart and used Firebase to achieve the login section of the code. We used APIs to get information for recipes based on the close to the expiry date.
Challenges we ran into
The challenge we ran into was the parsing of the API for the recipes. A lot of the open APIs might seem to be usable but when we tried to grab information from them, after pushing our ingredients we came into a lot of issues with getting the information that we wanted back. When we did get this information, the parsing of the information was very difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The accomplishment we are proud of is the interactive UI, we worked really hard on the user experience, especially since it is a huge part of the code and if anyone would even use it. We are also really proud of using Firebase and Flutter since it was the first time ever coding in Dart and using Flutter and creating a successful authentication process. We are also proud of the fact that we made an app that is useful to others and that will make an impact on food waste!
What we learned
We learned how to create a mobile app using Flutter as a framework. We also gained some key insight on javascript and Dart.js, as well as learned how to call an API from the backend of an application and deliver the response to the frontend.
What's next for Nourish
We hope to expand Nourish to have more fleshed-out features, such as a feature that allows you to take a picture of an expiration date and categorize it without having to type in anything. We also would love to implement a feature that allows for a running count of the items that have been bought and left to expire the most to advise users to buy them less. Lastly, we would love for our app to allow pop-up notifications, and find a more far-reached API that provides more than a few recipes based on ingredients.
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