Recipely

💡 Inspiration

Looking for recipes with dietary restrictions is hard. While brainstorming solutions to help individuals with vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free or kosher diets, we came to the shared conclusion that there were limited recipes available for those with special diets. We wanted to create a tool that will allow everyone to have access to all recipes- despite their dietary needs. By making it easier to adjust recipes to cater to individual dietary needs, we hope to help more people ease the transition to healthier, plant-based diets.

🤔 What it does

A web application for that gives replacements for ingredients for those who are vegetarians, vegans, halal, lactose-intolerant, gluten-free, and kosher! Recipely is a web app that helps individuals, couples, families, and roommates try new recipes- despite their dietary needs. For example, a vegan student may come across a delicious butter chicken recipe and previously may have skipped this recipe due to the challenges of personally thinking of substituting ingredients. Recipely extracts the replaceable ingredient from a given recipe and suggests viable, appropriate alternative ingredients for that dish. Recipely will display the updated recipe in order to help the user successfully cook the dish with the new ingredients!

🧰 How we built it

This is the first time our team has ever used Figma! Everyone had the opportunity to learn something new at Hack the North- whether this be experimenting with UI/UX design, front-end and back-end. We were amazed by how much we all learned throughout those two days and we definitely want to use these skills to challenge ourselves again! We built our frontend of Recipley using React and excellent prototyping tools from Figma and our backend with JavaScript and JSON files storing our customer database.

😅 Challenges we ran into

Excitingly enough, there were many challenges we ran into while building Recipely! The major challenges that we are thankful to have overcome are:

Various Ideas: As this was our first hackathon as a team, we had countless ideas that we wanted to accomplish and numerous technologies that we wanted to utilize. Thankfully, our team was quite diverse with abilities, we had members specialized in design, front-end, and back-end development. We wanted to try builidiing a chrome extension, web application, mobile iOS/Android application, and more!

Connecting the front-end to our database: We definitely struggled with connecting the front end’s beautiful design elements with the user database! We utiilized the Edamam API (https://developer.edamam.com/) for Recipely and was thankfully able to “pull it through” at the end.

🤩 Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Our team is incredibly proud of ourselves for trying UI/UX design and building a project that we were all extremely passionate about! It was quite exciting to work on a project that we would all regularly utilize and this really connected us as a team.

Another accomplishment that we are proud of us is teaching each other (and sometimes ourselves) various new technologies. We had team members with zero previous experience working with back-end development and other with design experience and we worked together to teach one another these new skills.

🎓 What's next for Recipely

We hope to be able to publish this application after beta-testing onto the AppStore and Google Play Store for the world's users who are (aspiring) vegetarians, vegans, halal, lactose-intolerant, gluten-free, and kosher!