The Greener Grocer

Bringing You Closer to Fresh, Local Produce: Connect with Your Community's Farmers' Markets Today!

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was the idea of consumers having the means to make better-informed decisions that support local markets. We decided to focus on farmers' markets as we all believed food was one of the key aspects of living a healthy, sustainable life.

What it does

Our project, The Green Grocer, is a web app that connects consumers to local farmers in order to promote sustainability. Farmers are able to list their available products, and users are then able to browse through these products as well as find nearby vendors and farmers' markets. This benefits both the vendors as well as the consumers: the first gets more business and the latter is able to enjoy fresher, healthier produce while leading a more eco-friendly lifestyle. The platform would also include a recipe generator, making this experience even more interactive for its users: by inputting certain foods they own and their amounts, they obtain a recipe that includes as many of these items as possible. Additionally, The Green Grocer contains a forum for customers and farmers alike to share recipes, recommendations, organize events and farmers' markets, and much more. By making the platform engaging, we encourage people to connect with their local community and make sustainable choices. All in all, this platform supports sustainable agriculture and helps reduce the impact of food production and transportation on our environment.

How we built it

Built a potential web app using Figma as the prototype designing tool, SQL3 and PostgreSQL as the database to store user and farmer information, and Google APIs to build the Map displaying store locations.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating each other's codes to work together

Maria: Not getting the desired responses at first when calling the Google Places API, and having trouble with setting up the map and displaying store tags based on where the user is.

Daniela: Difficulty adding a way for people to add tags to their forum posts

Hamsini: Integrating all our designs into one webapp where the users can interact with all of the functionalities that we developed as a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Daniela: Learned how to render a local website using html and flask

Maria: Despite the challenges I ran into I am proud to have learned how to work with multiple Google APIs (Places, Maps Javascript, and Geocoding) and successfully build the map where you can search for stores based on your zip code and have the map display multiple places within a certain radius that is close to you. Also becoming familiar with frontend technologies such as ReactJS (the tool used to implement the Map).

Hamsini: I am proud of how I was able to learn flask in a short time span and create a fully functioning backend with a login system.

What's next for The Greener Grocer

Tech-wise, we hope to integrate all of our tools and regroup everything we worked on into one complete and operational web app. There are also small elements we would have liked to add down the road, such as . In the future, we also hope to expand this platform idea to address other sustainability-linked issues for which shopping locally (especially at small businesses) could be a solution. For example, we could have a sister site or app that would address the issue of fast fashion by connecting users to places that offer more sustainable alternatives to buying mass-produced clothes (e.g., thrift stores, small local shops, or even handmade clothing).

Team Discords:

dzbib hamsini phantom 6grey

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