Recipe Recommender

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  The intended style of the UI we wanted to achieve

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  Outputting the top 3 recipes that use the least number of ingredients

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  sample input showing the regex as well as some of its workings

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  sample receipt in notebook

Inspiration

We hope to provide a service that not only promotes cooking healthy food from raw ingredients to boost people’s health but also fights back against food waste. According to a Business Waste review in 2023, the UK throws away around 9.5 million tons of food waste a year which is an issue that needs to be addressed but is often neglected. Alongside the hugely wasteful culture around throwing away food, an ever-growing number of people living in food poverty who, struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, rely heavily on food banks. Our hope with this application is that by providing high-quality recipes that use as many ingredients as possible we can help people be more efficient with their food and not only reduce their environmental impact but save them some money too!

What it does

Our goal was to make an application that allowed the user to upload a photo of a food receipt and be given a list of possible recipes using the ingredients shown.

How we built it

We had a mixed-ability team with two experienced programmers and a beginner who was new to Python, focused on learning how to use widgets (designing the interface) and discovering how to operate as a team using GitHub. We also learned the use of the requests library to be able to read img file text and then extract the correct data from JSON objects. This data then had to be compared to CSV files containing lots of recipe data.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use databases to find similar words. Instead, we used some advanced regular expressions with the findall() function of re to be able to find the recipes containing the ingredients which the receipt contained.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have taught each other so much and be able to promote such a crucial cause in the modern world. We also are so proud to have created a project which works from start to finish. However, it is clunky and could do with many improvements in its UI and backend efficiency.

What we learned

all the members learnt a lot, not only from each other but about food waste and the importance of fighting this issue! Specifically to do with creating a UI using a jupyter notebook, using widgets. Also learning certain libraries, navigating the use of data frames and reading from zip files.

What's next for Recipe Recommender

Overall, this project was extremely fun, and all the members learnt a lot, not only from each other but about food waste and the importance of fighting this issue! We hope to continue with this project in the future and turn it into a real-life app!!!

Built With

• anaconda
• conda
• csv
• jupyter
• pandas
• python
• requests
• vscode