Inspiration

Have you ever thrown away food because it went bad? Have you ever wished you had an application to help you prevent this from happening? I present to you: Waste Watchers.

What it does and How we built it

The goal of Waste Watchers is to avoid wasting food. Our very friendly interface allows you to add items to your “fridge” (the place where all your food is stored) when you buy food and remove items when you eat them. When you add items, you have the option to enter an expiration date for the item; otherwise, Waste Watchers will estimate when the food will expire for you. The main page of Waste Watchers will tell you what foods you have that are expiring soon, and will suggest recipes that use ingredients you have that are going to expire soon. The page also shows the full instructions on how to prepare each recipe. By telling you when your foods are expiring and suggesting ways in which you can eat these foods, Waste Watchers will significantly reduce the amount of food waste in your household. Waste Watchers will also be very easy to use, as there will be a scanner that will read the receipt from your groceries and automatically add everything you bought to your fridge. There will also be a feature that automatically removes a recipe's ingredients from your fridge after you cook that recipe. This makes Waste Watchers an essential app in every household, as it takes barely any time to use and will prevent lots of food waste.

Challenges

Only one of us was familiar with Elm before coding this project, but we decided to code in Elm anyways in order to have a learning experience. This presented some challenges for us, as we had to learn new functions and syntax as we coded.

What We Learned

Besides learning to code in Elm, we also learned the importance of delegating different tasks to different people in order to efficiently get work done. We also found that teamwork makes the dream work... while we all silently dream of working alone.

Endorsements

Waste Watchers is endorsed by Nathan Berg, who told us he would love to use Waste Watchers after we have finished development. Waste Watchers also uses recipes from Al Yassin Rahman (obtained with consent), which implies endorsement of our product.