ShodaiGhor

Inspiration

In today’s Bangladesh, food waste is a growing concern, and the pressing issue of hunger still lingers everywhere. But what if we could bridge the gap between abundance and need, using a webpage as a facilitator? Our project – Shodai Ghor, is a platform designed to do just that, connecting those with surplus food to those who need it.

Shodai Ghor is more than just a food donation platform, it’s a community hub where people come together to minimize waste, share resources and explore numerous culinary possibilities. Just imagine logging into a website where your personal food inventory is a valuable tool to keep track of ingredients which can be used as a resource, not just to yourself, but for others in need.

What it does

Personal Inventory System

User-specific inventory: Each user has a personal inventory where they can input the food and ingredients they own in their pantry. This is a private inventory for each user, and this can be updated as they add, consume or donate items.

Inventory Management: This system allows every user to manage their food stocks in an efficient manner and keep track of what they have and what they might need to consume before it spoils.

Community Hub

Donation Platform: Users have the ability to donate any extra food in their inventory to the community marketplace. This is quite helpful for those who tend to have a surplus amount of food that they might not use before it expires.

Access to Donations: Users have the freedom to browse the community hub and if they can find something they need, they can claim it anytime. This results in a circular system where the food is shared throughout the whole community, reducing waste and helping those who might be in need of certain items.

Real-Time Updates: The community Hub is always updated in real-time ensuring the latest available donations, therefore allowing users to claim the items they need quickly.

AI-Driven Recipe Suggestions

Recipe Generation: This Website also features an integrated and personalized AI that has the capability of analyzing the user’s personal inventory. Based on the items that the user has, the AI cooks a list of possible recipes they can make. This feature lets users make the most of what they already have and also encourages creativity in the kitchen.

Customizations: the user can also input dietary preference, restrictions, or any specific type of cuisine they enjoy, and the AI will adapt and tailor the recipes accordingly.

Community Hub Integration: if a user is missing any kind of key ingredient required to cook a recipe, the ai can suggest an alternative recipe based on what’s available on the community hub. This integration helps users to complete meals without needing to purchase any additional items

How we built it

The development of ShodaiGhor prioritized creating a user-friendly platform for food waste reduction and community sharing. We built the frontend using React.js and tailwind, ensuring a responsive and component-based UI. Firebase powers our backend, handling authentication, real-time database operations, and cloud functions. For efficient data flow, we implemented state management using React Context API. The Cheffy chatbot, integrated via Google Gemini API, enhances user experience with recipe suggestions. Security was paramount, with stringent Firebase security rules and secure environment variable management in place. Our development workflow leveraged Git for version control, employing a feature-branch strategy for collaborative coding. Quality assurance involved comprehensive testing, including unit, integration, and cross-device compatibility checks. We deployed the application on Vercel, utilizing its CI/CD capabilities for seamless updates. To ensure ongoing improvement, we integrated error logging and user analytics. This architecture forms the foundation of a scalable, secure application that effectively serves our user base while remaining flexible for future enhancements.

Challenges we ran into

Developing Shodai Ghor presented several significant challenges that pushed our team to innovate and problem-solve: Real-time Data Synchronization: Ensuring seamless, real-time updates across multiple users for inventory and donation statuses proved complex. We had to optimize our Firebase database structure and implement efficient querying mechanisms to maintain performance as our user base grew. User Authentication and Privacy: Balancing user convenience with data security was crucial. We faced challenges in implementing a robust authentication system that protected user information while still facilitating easy sign-up and login processes. AI Integration Complexity: Integrating the AI chatbot (Cheffy) for recipe suggestions required extensive natural language processing. Ensuring accurate ingredient recognition and providing relevant recipes based on available items was particularly challenging. Scalability Concerns: As our user base expanded, we encountered scalability issues, particularly with database reads and writes. This required us to rethink our data structure and implement more efficient querying and caching strategies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The idea of this project led us to join our first hackathon. Therefore, we are really proud of the efforts we were able to make as a team of 4 and we were astonished about the incredible progress we were able to make in such a short time span. We have had our ups and downs during the making of this website, and we also had to overcome countless obstacles, but the team made it through by coordinating everyone’s efforts and energy. The plan wasn’t to make a fancy recipe AI or a community where people would look for free items. The Plan was simple, it was the idea of reducing food waste per household so that people don’t have to go through extra measures to just eat the meal they want. Even though the website has its flaws, to implement everything according to the idea and the goal we have, we will give the time to make this webpage accessible everywhere.

What we learned

This was our first time participating in a hackathon project and we had less experience with working on projects, so we developed our skills on web development along the way. Also, we learned how to use an AI model to build a chatbot.

What's next for Shodai Ghor

We intend to remove hunger and food wastage from this world. We want to take this website to next so that can actually work for reducing Hunger from this world

Users would automatically get suggestions based on algorithms for ingredients that they inquire in their chats more often. Also, they would get a preference of request for ingredients that are closer to their area.

Our goal is to collaborate with organizations who work to reduce hunger for the less advantage people.