#38: PlatePal

PlatePal is a platform that targets college students, empowering them to minimize food waste effectively by providing a way to share surplus groceries and other items within their campus community.

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Inspiration

Over 220 Million tons of food waste is produced by college students in America. This equates to around 1.8 Trillion pounds of CO2 emissions from the food waste. Our goal for this project was to introduce a collaborative and sustainable platform for college students to effectively manage their excess groceries.

What it does

Features of the platform include:

  • User Friendly Design
  • Inventory Management
  • Make requests for certain food
  • Make posts to give away food from your inventory
  • Recipe recommendations based on current inventory and the groceries in store at that moment
  • Alerts students when an item they’ve requested has been posted

How we built it

For this project, we built a Full-Stack web application. We used Figma to design the layout and then used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to execute it. For the backend, we used Express.js, Node.js and connected it to a database through MySQL. Furthermore, we used OpenAI's API Chat Completions Endpoint.

Challenges we ran into

We weren't able to fully implement the user authentication and inventory management. However, we prepared our database as well as our frontend elements that can showcase all the functionality when run independently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We weren't expecting to be able to create a Full-Stack Web Application in such a short amount of time. We got to experience working with technologies that many of us had not previously worked in, including MySQL. We were able to fully follow through with our Figma design and implement a minimally viable product. Furthermore, we were able to successfully employ OpenAI's API to generate recipe suggestions for items in a student's inventory.

What we learned

  • New technologies: MySQL, Figma, OpenAI, Git
  • How to put together minimally viable product in just 36 hours.
  • Navigate our project development with GitHub, and overcame difficulties including merge conflicts.

What's next for PlatePal

  • Adding inclusive recipes for different cultures
  • Collecting excess food from club meetings
  • Drop off and pick up via universities
  • Matching students with ingredients for recipes
  • Expanding to clothing, furniture, and more
  • Implementing university student authentication
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