As students in second year, we have all recently started cooking for ourselves. Very quickly, we discovered the challenges of grocery shopping and cooking everything we bought before it goes bad. To solve this problem we came up with a hack.
WasteLess allows the user to take a picture of the food inside their fridge and put it onto our web-app. The web-app then processes all the items inside the fridge and populates different recipes that the user could follow. This helps people all across the world efficiently use groceries and effectively waste less.
The web application is built using the popular MERN stack (Mongo, Express, React, Node) and utilizes Google's Cloud Vision API for image recognition and Firebase Database for storage. The web application also utilizes other third party API's for recipe information. To ensure a smooth and thought out user experience, we used Figma to make design mock-ups before coding.
As new programmers it was difficult to work with asynchronous programming concepts. As well, our team ran into challenges with git for version control and workload distribution.
We're really excited to have a finished product ready for demo and use! As fairly inexperienced programmers, we're really happy we were able to work so well together and overcome our issues.
As a team, we learned a lot about asynchronous programming in JavaScript, node and express for backend, and git. As well, it was our first time working with Firebase's services and we learned a lot about the difference functionalities provided.
The next step for WasteLess would be to use machine learning and tell the user different ways they could be more efficient with their groceries and using their produce.
