Transforming Waste into Taste: Recipes at Your Fingertips

Inspiration

Our inspiration stemmed from a desire to combat food waste by targeting everyday people. We noticed that in our day-to-day lives, we throw away a lot of food which is still edible. We wanted to create delicious meals from ingredients on hand.

What it does

We built a website which gives recipes based on the inputted ingredients and the amount of time the user has. Our mission is to offer users delicious recipe solutions, preventing the user from discarding unused ingredients.

How we built it

We used a React frontend with a Node backend to create our website. Users encounter a series of prompts crafted in React. These prompts are intelligently rephrased for the Cohere API to get specific and accurate results which is integrated into our backend. Using artificial intelligence, our system retrieves and processes data, and showcases it on the website.

Challenges we ran into

Our team faced two main obstacles. First, it was really hard for us to untangle the backend from the frontend. It took us almost 6 repositories to finally get it right. The other issue was integrating the COHERE API with our existing code. With a little help from the mentors we finally got around it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The final action of fitting our website image into the thumbnail frame was the most rewarding and proudful moment. We finally finished!

What we learned

We learnt the FUTURE! This marked our first experience with integrating an API into a website. Previously, we relied on hardcoded solutions to obtain the necessary results. The API was able to do find answers for any data we threw at it. This is just a stepping stone for us as we enter the world of AI (aka the future)

What's next for Transforming Waste into Taste: Recipes at Your Fingertips

We want to publish the website instead of keeping it local and want establish a dedicated section for user feedback, allowing us to gauge how accurate and tasty the recipes are.