ZeroHero: Reducing Food Waste with Object Recognition

Inspiration

We were looking for projects that warms our hearts. As university students, we have first hand experiences on what it feels like to throw away leftover ingredients that we didn't use. Therefore, we've decided, for the sake of reducing food waste, to create an app that provides creative dishes for people to put their leftover ingredients to good use.

What it does

ZeroHero is a fully functional cross-platform mobile app that will take a picture of your leftover ingredients and suggest healthy, delicious, and invigorating recipes from top chefs all over the world.

How we built it

1) We gathered all the relevant APIs and resources.

2) We built our base photo taking app using React Native.

3) We captured and labeled 2,000+ images of fruits and vegetables for Google AutoML training.

4) We wrote functions to call Spoonacular API and Google AutoML API.

5) We linked everything together in our application.

Challenges we ran into

1) We had to create our own data set of hand-labeled images of fruits and vegetables.

2) We had to recursively query Spoonacular API for recipes and their nutritional information.

3) We had to familiarize ourselves with React Native to convert images to a base64 string to query Google AutoML.

4) Connecting our app to Spoonacular API and our deployed object classification model on Google Cloud.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Our hand-labeled data set of over 2,000+ images achieved incredible results with AutoML training!

2) Successfully linking Sponnacular and Google Cloud APIs to our React Native application.

3) Familiarizing ourselves with JavaScript.

4) The potential of this app.

What we learned

1) JavaScript

2) Google Cloud Platform

3) Teamwork

4) How much two avocados cost at Kroger

What's next for ZeroHero: Reducing Food Waste with Object Recognition

In the future, ZeroHero will be able to identify a wider variety of ingredients such as meats, nuts, and even canned foods to suggest even wilder recipes that will blow your mind. Furthermore, we will also be able to take into consideration the quantity of individual ingredients to improve the recipes that we suggest. We will also be able to tell you the estimated lifespan of your ingredients before it goes bad.

Built With

• automl-vision
• expo.io
• google-cloud-automl
• node.js
• python
• react-native