SLO Bites

SLO Bites Logo

Inspiration

Finding good food on campus can be hit or miss, and students often rely on word-of-mouth or trial and error. We wanted to create a centralized place where Cal Poly students can quickly see honest reviews for every dining food on campus. Inspired by platforms like Yelp and Tinder, we built SLO Bites to make discovering great food easier, faster, and more reliable based on one's cravings.

What it does

SLO Bites is a campus-focused food review platform that allows students to, browse dining locations and menu items across Cal Poly, read and leave reviews for specific foods, discover the best (and avoid the worst) options on campus, and make more informed dining decisions based on real student feedback. It also has a "cravings" feature that uses AI to suggest food options that best suit an individual's cravings based on their preferences.

How we built it

We utilized Kiro to brainstorm ideas and improve functionality over time through prompt engineering, using it to help build features, debug issues, and deploy the app to production.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was deployment. Since we are relatively new to hackathons, finding a provider for our website was difficult. We eventually landed on Render. We also had to find a place to store images; eventually we landed on Cloudinary. Despite these challenges, we learned a great deal about databases and how to create a public website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to bring an idea we had for a long time to life and showcasing its practicality. As freshmen, being limited to campus dining options has overtime made us selective on what we want to eat. Knowing how the menu changes pretty frequently, we want to try new things but also don't want to spend money if the general consensus/reviews are negative; we know many students share this sentiment. This is also a starting point for a project our team will continue working on after the Hackathon.

What we learned

We learned how to use an AI agent responsibly in order to create a website in a time-pressured environment. We also learned how to utilize AI in our website, as well as APIs and databases.

What's next for SLO Bites

We plan to continue working on this project and we feel strongly about incorporating it to student life at Cal Poly SLO. We would like to deploy it as an app as well as continue improving the functionality and aesthetics of SLO Bites!