#54 Hacksu

It's hard to come up with what to eat and you don't want to make a trip to the store. Use our application to use your leftover ingredients to make a new recipe to reduce food waste.

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Inspiration

We are broke college students who want to save money and reduce food waste. We wanted to create an application that would allow us to enter ingredients laying around our kitchen and give us a fun and new recipe. According to Feeding America, nearly 80 tons of food are wasted annually in the US. This means that more resources are used to process, package, and transport food that is never consumed. Our project aims to create a tool for those who want to make the most of ingredients they already have on hand.

What it does

Allows the user to enter the ingredients in their kitchen and search for a recipe. In future iterations, users may be able to bookmark recipes and create shopping lists of ingredients they don't have.

How we built it

We used VueJS for our user interface and NodeJS for our backend. Our team used GitHub to manage our codebase and create separate branches to isolate changes related to certain features.

Challenges we ran into

Our team used this experience to continue exposing ourselves to VueJS. Because we are new to this technology we found ourselves spending a lot of time looking through documentation. One particular frustration was the differences between VueJS versions. Online resources such as ChatGPT didn't always have the most up to date information on how certain libraries have changed since 2022. Most of the time our experience using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript did not directly translate into code which worked well in VueJS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to finish an initial version of our UI, and begin the process of performing searches with the Spoonacular API.

What we learned

As we worked on this project, we began to become more accustomed to the structure of a VueJS application.

What's next for The Pantry

After completing our core features, we have ambitions to implement a barcode scanner to make ingredient input easier and faster. In addition to this, we would like to create a user login system to allow users to save their preferences and recipes in a database.

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