The UTD Student Food Finder is a specialized, budget-conscious decision-making tool designed to help University of Texas at Dallas students navigate the local culinary landscape of Richardson and North Texas. Recognizing the financial constraints of student life, the application offers two distinct workflows: "Cook It Yourself" and "Go to a Restaurant."
The "Cook It" mode leverages TheMealDB API to discover recipes and cross-references ingredient requirements with local grocery stores found via the Google Places API. It uses a data-driven pricing engine that applies store-specific multipliers, benchmarked against Walmart/Kroger baseline data, to help students determine whether a trip to Aldi or Tom Thumb is more cost-effective for their meal.
Technically, the application is built as a robust Python-based CLI tool that orchestrates multiple external data sources into a unified user experience. The system features a custom classification engine that maps dish keywords to cuisine types, ensuring that restaurant searches are highly relevant to the user’s cravings. A key highlight for the UTD community is the integration of a curated database of local student discounts, which automatically matches nearby restaurants with valid "Comet Card" deals. By combining real-time location services, recipe metadata, and regional retail pricing tiers, the UTD Student Food Finder serves as both a logistical utility and a financial aid for students looking to balance nutritional variety with a limited budget.
Some challenges we faced working on this project are utilizing GitHub and APIs, as well as setting up the grocery price multiplier with either Walmart (main) or Kroger(branch) as our baseline prices, since there is no grocery price API.
Built With
- google-places
- nebula
- python
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