Inspiration
Food waste is a huge problem in today's world. With food sold in bulk and living by yourself as a college student, you don't always finish that loaf of bread before the expiry date. Or sometimes you buy something and forget to eat it until three years later. More often than not, you think you have time to make an elaborate dinner for yourself but forget to use any of the perishable foods you bought in time.
What it does
What if you had an app that reminded you you bought bananas 6 days ago and they're about to expire? What if it reminded you with a bunch of recipes as inspiration? If you have info on all of the things in your fridge that are about to expire, you can make one meal that will use all of those products and reduce food waste.
How I built it
Using twilio's SMS feature, we built an app that doesn't require data or storage. We receive texts from users with the produce they bought and when it will expire (in days) and it keeps a record of this in a dictionary. Every morning, it checks the items that are closest to the expiry date and finds a receipt using the Edamam API for recipes that have that ingredient. It returns the recipe name and a link for it.
Challenges I ran into
Finding a good recipe API was difficult, however Edamam was exactly what we needed. 50% of our team are beginners not in the engineering field and we wanted to include them as much as possible, so keeping them following along was tough.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We managed to make an informative and robust app with a team of beginners.
What I learned
A lot of us were using Twilio for the very first time.
What's next for Fresh
Next we will work on ways to keep inventory of items you have and if you need to buy more or not. If you haven't finished the spinach and are about to buy it, the app will let you know there is some left over.
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