Recipe Express

Cook to Impress

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Inspiration

You're in your kitchen and want to make food. You have a limited set of ingredients and wonder what you can cook! This is where Recipe Express comes in.

What it does

Recipe Express allows you to enter your pantry items and look up the possible recipes you can make with what you have. In case you don't have all the items, you can place an order for the missing items through the platform and those show up at your doorstep. This allows you to save time and be able to cook your favorite meals whenever you want.

How we built it

We built the front end of this application using React. The back end was made with MongoDB and Python-Flask. The work was divided into groups of two. David and Arnab Did front-end, while Matt and Nick did Back-end

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was that the data recipe data we had access to was not clean. There was a lot of irregular extra text around the ingredients (i.e. "1/2 cup of broccoli"). We overcame this by using regular expressions in our database queries to match to the terms of interest.

Another challenge was combining the back end functionality with the front-end. We had never touched these languages/frameworks before this weekend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Recipe Express

An appearance on Dragon's den. We're confident Recipe Express has the potential for big investments. There are a lot of ways Recipe Express can grow and be developed. Some key services to add are automated grocery ordering, ingredient auto-complete (for ease of use), and if the user base expands employing ML algorithms to provide recommendation service based on user-history and recipe use correlation (even before this we could scrape data from the web on reviews for recipes and use that as a pseudo-metric for ranking recipes and deciding on the order to present them to a user after a search).

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