Sudo Make Me A Sandwich

The app that recommends community-approved recipes for you based on what's in your fridge.

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Inspiration

Imagine not having to think of what to cook everyday based on the food you have in your storage. Wouldn't it be nice to have an app that recommends you recipes based on exactly what you have in your fridge? Our app aims to do just that!

What it does

Recommend recipes based on your grocery receipts, prioritized according to community preferences. It does so by having you take a photo of your receipt, performing image to text recognition, and adding these ingredients to your fridge folder in the app. Once you confirm the recipe of your interest, those ingredients will be removed from your app fridge.

How we built it

We used Android-Studio and the React-Native framework to build our Android-based application. The app was built to take pictures of grocery receipts, and convert the image to text with the help of Google Cloud Platform's Vision API. This was measured with a dictionary of grocery items to cross-reference the food items and separate them from other groceries. After we have the ingredients, we use RapidAPI's Recipe API which includes over 360,000 recipes as well as an open source recipe database, to search and recommend recipes by taking ingredients as inputs.

Challenges we ran into

Since none of us had done Android app development before, it was a challenge to choose which framework to use while building the app. We chose React-Native because of its initial simplicity in setting up, but we came across other challenges with React-Native as it is fairly recent as well. We were also limited by our language experience to achieve the functionalities we desire because some of us haven't had experience with java language.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning new things in one night and getting things to work. Surviving a hackathon!

What we learned

We learned how to develop an app through React-Native, build the framework after encountering different dependency and system incompatibility issues in Linux, and code in a new language (JavaScript), integrate different backend APIs and libraries to achieve the functionalities that we desire. Android App Development, React-Native Framework, JavaScript, integrating them with APIs - basically everything we used to build our app during the hackathon. We also learned to be wary of exceeding our API calls the hard way.

What's next for Sudo Make Me A Sandwich

Expanding the menu! Enhancing the UI and adding recommendations categorized according to cuisine, health and nutrition diets is also in the pipeline. Integrating our app with the Google Calendar Events API to make the most out of the app during special occasions and events is next too. It could serve as a personal assistant who chooses healthy meals based on what we have in the fridge and dietary preferences.

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