Savor

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The Solution
Bar Code Scanner
Database
Item Collection
Item Description
Expiring Item
Gemini API
Gemini Recipe Chat

Inspiration

People, especially nowadays, often discard and waste food. This may be because of a multitude of reasons, ranging from expiration, abundance, or just plain forgetfulness. As humans, we sometimes take things for granted and don’t think about the consequences that come with them. Therefore, our main mission when brainstorming about what eventually led to being Savor was to use the wonders of technology to prevent the rising problem known as food waste. However, it felt like an issue that most would brush off since it isn’t an integral part of their lifestyle, so we came up with the idea of hopefully, through the power of Gemini API, integrating the idea of food preservation, tracking, and cooking as a centerpiece instead.

What it does

Our application, Savor, is an AI recipe-generating app that leverages the use of Google’s Gemini API, Firebase, and React Native to build an application that promotes eco-friendliness, and food preservation, whilst at the same time preventing food waste. We do this by allowing users to scan item’s barcodes through the “expo-barcode-scanner” API, before storing them in our Firebase Database, along with their respective qualities, in order to organize and feed data into Gemini, which will then generate unique step-by-step recipes for users.

How we built it

Our team utilized Expo to simulate the user experience through React Native for the front end. We also included several components such as barcode react-native scanning to grab the information of a product. We were able to grab from the product information by utilizing the UPCItemdb API. For the backend, we utilized Firebase which allowed for an incredible experience for user authentication while also including the Firestore database, we used nodeJS and connected it with ExpressJS routes. Additionally, we brought out Gemini's API's full potential by using its insane data-gathering capability to retrieve and track a multitude of item qualities: Through Gemini’s API, we were also able to fetch and use our product database from Firestore to generate unique step-by-step recipes to prevent food waste, help with diets, and reach fitness goals.

Challenges we ran into

This hackathon was a challenge since most of our teammates were not familiar with working with strangers and collaborating on new ideas and perspectives. This posed a challenge as we had to adapt to new technologies and also learn to collaborate and communicate effectively with each other. Additionally, it was our first time building a full-stack app with react-native using Expo. While many of us had prior experience with full-stack development on websites, working as a team to build a mobile application was a new experience for all of us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we are happy to have gotten this far with something that had just started as a vague idea mentioned during one of our conversations. For one of our team members, this was their first hackathon and for another, it was their first time ever working with Node.js. With that in mind, we are extremely proud that we all managed to contribute, learn, and grow from this amazing experience. Although it did not come without trials and challenges, it ended with every single one of us proud of our skills, product, and most importantly, each other.

What we learned

From this experience, my team and I learned an innumerable amount of lessons, but the ones that stood out were the ability to work as a team, learn new technologies, and stay motivated through harsh times. Most of our team were nothing more than strangers sharing the same interests, but we slowly grew closer to better understanding and improving the project at hand. The start of the hackathon was definitely one of the more rocky times as we were still getting used to working with one another and not only understanding each other’s skills but our own skills as we were all in the learning process of something new and innovative. However, we eventually managed to move past this, and even throughout the countless hours of being stuck in a particular error, or having the Wifi give up on us a few times, we managed to strive and move forward with our idea, which has become a product of pride.

What's next for Savor

Moving forward, we would like to stick to our goal of keeping the environment as clean as possible and saving as much food from being thrown out and/or wasted due to the slight mistake of forgetting you had it in the first place. Although we are extremely happy with how Savor turned out within only 36 hours, we still have many ideas and plans that we want to implement. Things such as the previously mentioned Allergies options which create a diet around your allergies, or how the application would have multiple sorting algorithms in place to allow you to sort by expiration date, quantity, or category. All these ideas were considered to be in the project that would be presented today, but we had to allocate our time wisely and therefore couldn’t get to all our plans. However, because this project has been so much fun, we cannot wait to continue adding to the project to hopefully be able to pull off our goal, no matter how significant.