Inspiration
The U.S. is facing a growing population that is affected by problems such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and more. These problems often lead to high medical costs, which can be devastating for people. The foods that are linked to these problems are also usually highly processed, which results in a large portion of carbon emissions produced by the U.S. each year. These problems are seldom seen in the five locations dubbed "blue zones", which have the highest concentrations of centenarians and minimal food-related diseases/conditions. We wanted to provide a comprehensive "blue zone" lifestyle resource available to people around the world and allow them to develop a community centered around healthy, sustainable living.
What it does
Blue Eating is a web application that provides users with a place to adopt eating habits from the blue zones and our business model features general information on the blue zone lifestyle and its benefits. Key features of the app: the ability to explore Blue Eating's mass recipe database and the ability to add your recipes to Blue Eating's database and manage your own recipes.
How we built it
We formulated a very well-rounded team in order to develop this project. We had two members with significant front-end development experience. Those members focused on the front-end of Blue Eating, using React.js. Our other two team members had more experience with data and databases, and thus worked on the back-end of our project using MongoDB Atlas, Express.js, and Node.js. Our initial database was curated largely through blue zone cookbooks and bluezones.com.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a few challenges throughout our project. We initially ran into some difficulties connecting the databases using MongoDB Atlas and initializing the REST APIs we generated via those APIs. Specifically, we had some difficulty passing recipe images into our database, but resolved that issue by circumnavigating MongoDB Atlas. To do this, we implemented a muter and then stored the images into a folder inside of a Node.js file.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Developing a comprehensive product complete with a business model that outlines Blue Eating's growth potential. Our web application has an aesthetically pleasing UI and complementary UX. We were also able to at least partially implement all the features we outlined in our plan.
What we learned
We learned more about MongoDB Atlas, GitHub Copilot, generating REST APIs, and debugging techniques appropriate for web applications. We also learned how to create a business model appropriate for our product and design a plan for Blue Eating's growth potential.
What's next for Blue Eating
Growth is essential for any company that wants to remain competitive and successful in the long term. Blue Eating is just getting started. Instead of building up and providing to a narrowing user base, we want to grow down and out. Our immediate goals are to partner with sponsors and generate revenue to develop features that make Blue Eating more user-friendly for people with specific dietary needs. Eventually, our goal is to let the community drive Blue Eating. We want our users to tell us what they want so we can implement it and provide an experience from which everyone can benefit.
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