Smart Meals

Home Page
Search Results
Panera salad
Item Description
Budget Page

Inspiration

Finding food that you like is hard, it is even harder when you have a budget to consider. Keeping track of your food budget becomes increasingly difficult as you have to account for the expenses of dietary restrictions like gluten intolerance, vegetarianism, kosher, keto, diabetes, etc. Many people tend to exceed their food budget, and this is especially true for college students, who when trying to eat healthily or stay on a certain diet, spend way more on food than they would realistically like to. This can be attributed to the psychological term ‘Present Bias’ where you tend to weigh choices with immediate rewards much more than meaningful choices that would let you get good food for less money.

So, we have put our best effort in developing Smart Meals in order to solve the mass intersection of these problems that are faced by more than 80% of people.

What it does

Enter a budget that you would like to spend under and explore all the countless options of individual food items within a 5-mile radius near you. Filter the food that you can eat by toggling the “Vegetarian”, “Fast Food”, and “Gluten-Free” switches. You can even adjust the distance of stores you want to scan. Track your budget as you buy food. Eating out can get expensive, but you also want to try new things while staying under your budget. Always find your craving that meets your dietary restriction while never going out to eat and spending more than what you need to again.

How we built it

We wrote automated scripts in python using selenium and other web drivers in order to scrape information about the food items. We used Google Firebase in order to serve our database and images. The Frontend was developed using Flutter. We used three open-source food datasets on Kaggle in order to train three separate recurrent neural network classifiers that tag our food as fast food, vegetarian and gluten-free respectively using google colab. We also wrote an algorithm that uses all your logged spending data in order to suggest an allowance on a given day. This feature helps you maximize the days you can eat out while staying under your monthly budget.

Challenges we ran into

Unable to host network image URLs properly. Getting meaningful results from the RNN Classifier and also building the suggested budget algorithm. All of it took some perseverance and a couple of red bulls to solve :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Scraping the Websites and building generalized components to scrape multiple ones. Building an RNN classifier to tag our items and tuning them with the right hyperparameter. Learning all the flutter framework packages needed to build the app.

What we learned

People who have a hard time following their dietary restrictions while eating out, including us, deserve an easy experience finding their craving like anyone else. Always be able to find new options to explore and stay under your budget while eating out to your heart's content. Budgeting should be targeted one facet at a time, starting with food. This will incentivize people to begin budgeting and keep track of their finances.

What's next for Smart Meals

Future plans we have include in-app purchasing, introducing more filters for dietary restrictions, tracking calories, and also building a constructive meal plan based on your budget and habits.