ChewCrew

Empowering Social Good and Food
Eating alone isn't that good for you. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orcp.2017.09.002
Our idea, simplified.
What exactly it does.
Space for a product demo (catch us in-person for the *full experience*)
Competitive Analysis, simplified.
Market research results. Collected 21 responses (+growing)
Who are these people? All we know is that they're so cool thanks to the help of Pocari Sweat.

Inspiration

Tasked with connecting people through food as a means of improving the world's health and wellbeing, we first looked at Family-Style dining. Though sharing food isn't common in every culture, food is a universal language. The communal nature is fitting for the outcomes we hope to achieve.

We leveraged our experiences as busy (and broke) college students to narrow-in on the prevalence of eating alone. With further exploration, we discovered that it poses health risks. Research shows that there's a link between metabolic syndrome and eating alone. This study expands upon previous work that details the social isolation ... loneliness and unhealthy diets that exist with this activity.

What it does

ChewCrew is a social dining platform that facilitates connections by offering rewards for sharing a restaurant table. Its simplicity seamlessly brings people together, while preserving the authenticity of our dining experiences that we hold so dear.

How It Works:

(1) Look - scroll through restaurants in your area. These local partners are dubbed our "Partners of Social Food" for opening their spaces for strangers to meet.
(2) Join - or create your own "party." Given the early stages of our prototype, it's a social contract, not an official reservation (however, "Partners of Social Food" are aware of the spontaneous groupings).
(3) Discounts - Save up to 20% off your bill for sharing. This works on a tier system; the more people who join the party, the higher the rewards.

How we built it

We utilized the Maps JavaScript API from Google to showcase restaurants on the website. Convex was used for the backend, which made it tremendously easier to work on this project. React was used for frontend, with MaterialUI utilized for components.

Challenges we ran into

Differentiation. Connecting people through food has been tackled since the (near) beginning of the internet. We've done tons of research on the competitive space. Most options gamify for the sake of gamifying, or charge a service fee. Though there are similarities, rest assured that ChewCrew incorporates research and relevance with the formation of our incentivization model.

Oh, and of course, typescript issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our ability to balance an open mind and attention to detail throughout the course of the project. ChewCrew was originally a "Tinder for Food" before pivoting to address the health angle in the 21st (digital) century. Our project organization was a huge factor in helping facilitate cohesion ... and a sense of peace amidst all the chaos.

We are also very proud of Clement for winning the poker tournament. Expect to bet on ChewCrew and win, like our dear ol' teammate did. Honorable Mention: 75% of our team hiked the Stanford Dish at 7am in the morning!!

What we learned

We learned a lot about working in a team to make something new quickly. Even when we settled on a central idea for our main product, upon deeper discussion, we found that everyone had a different version of the same product in mind in terms of design and user-flow matters. We learned to exchange our ideas more in depth, craft out a plan together, and execute on it effectively.

Significantly - now is a critical time to bring people together over the dinner table given the world after the pandemic.

What's next for ChewCrew

Within our time here at Treehacks, we did not have the time to fully finalize our ideas for the website. We would like to work on implementing everything we had in mind then publish the website so people can actually access it (currently it only runs locally). Next steps would include a mobile-optimized version of the website, and beyond that possibly mobile apps for iOS and Android. We believe since this is aimed at Gen Z, having a mobile app would be the best to engage with the target audience.