Sustainable Recipe Search

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  Homepage

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  Example of cooking instructions

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  Example of dish image

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  Example of ingredients list

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from the looming climate crisis and how it made us think about how we as aspiring programmers could help contribute to this battle. Because of this, out of the options given for our project category during the application process, we knew we wanted to do something in the realm of sustainability. Meat and dairy production is one of the leading contributors to carbon emissions worldwide, and vegan dietary options is one of the best ways to reduce individuals' carbon footprint through consuming ethically sourced and grown meals.

What it does

Our search engine is a tailor-made cookbook of sorts, taking in an input of a meal that the user would like to eat and returning a list of vegan meal recipes. It provides a list of the ingredients required to make the dish as well as instructions, a link to the original recipe, and an image of the intended finished product.

How we built it

We chose to use Retool for this project, as the four of us are all first-time hackathon participants and this is the first time that we are creating a practical use for our code. Retool was shown to handle both the front-end and back-end operations needed to complete our project, as well as providing compatibility with the APIs needed to make our idea work. We used Spoonacular to power our recipe search engine, as it provided lots of recipes to choose from, allowed us to single out only vegan options for search results, and was easily implemented into Retool.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we faced was our inexperience in creating practical products to become our solutions, as the four of us had only started coding recently and had not yet delved into the inner workings of software development. It was very hard to begin, as we only knew of our ideas, yet not how to implement them. Second, it was hard to choose which idea to go forward with. We knew we wanted to do something in the field of sustainability, but the practicality of each idea combined with the limited timeframe led us to use the methods and ideas that eventually became our cookbook today.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that despite our inexperience and limited technical knowledge, as well as an incomplete idea of what we would end up doing, we created something that works and is useful in accomplishing the goal we had set for ourselves by coming to this hackathon. Albeit simple, we believe this was an important step if we wanted to continue making practical applications for our developing coding skills.

What we learned

We learned how to access APIs, databases, and the overall design process of an application through Retool. We also learned how to take advantage of Postman, as it allowed us to dissect the APIs to find what we really needed to make our idea come into fruition.

What's next for Sustainable Recipe Search

There are many things that we were unable to do with the skillset and time that we have, such as displaying the amount of carbon emissions offset by making and consuming sustainable vegan alternatives. In the future, we would like to display this alongside our recipes and ingredients, allowing users to know the impact that they are making upon the environment by choosing a vegan diet. We would also like to have a slightly cleaner yet more complex UI to account for possible improvements on our project.

Built With

• retool
• spoonacular