ConsumerCompass

Why?

Every day, we consume dozens of products that go straight under our nose. Amongst these products are the various foods we consume, anywhere from a bag of chips to a can of soda. We never really bat an eye when thinking about how the food was made. It turns out, many of the foods that we enjoy every single day have unintended side effects to our environment, and the companies who produce them are a major factor in this. Many of the companies are focused on the financial side of production rather than taking into account the environment in their production. Because of this, we strive to bring attention to the consumers, and in turn, show consumer-driven analytics to companies for change.

How does it work?

All the user has to do to get information on their product is scan its barcode. They can do this at a store, at home, or anywhere they want to get information about their product. The app scans the barcode, gets the number in UPC format, and then identifies the food product along with its nutritional statistics and sustanaibility information. Our app not only tells the user vital information about how sustainably sourced a product is, but it also gives information about how healthy the product is, and how affordable it is. It does this by combining the three main factors into a hollistic rating of the product, evaluating its benefits for the users. Once the user has scanned the product, companies can view their products by brand and see their ratings on a graph. They can click on the product and view its total rating and description of why the product would be harmful to either the environment or consumer health. By viewing these factors, companies can easily see what about their production or product needs to be improved, streamlining the process. Not only can consumers have a real-time impact on their own health and being more sustainable, but companies can have a clear metric by which to measure their sustainbility, holding them accountable in front of consumers and driving progress in sustainability, health, and affordability.

How we built it

When going down the business track, we considerd that the main problems with businesses today is that nobody is holding them accountable for their sustainability, health, and affordability. We figured that if we created a consumer-driven application which holds businesses accountable and exposes their levels of health and sustainability, it could drive real change and progress. We started by iterating through ideas, figuring out how we could best incorporate the user into the process. We settled on this idea after determining that it was the easiest to use and the most helpful for companies.

Front-end

Next.js *Tailwind CSS

Back-end

Node.js
Express.js
Gemini
MongoDB
NGiNX
Docker
Open Food Facts API

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the development of this app, we ran into multiple challenges with both the front-end and back-end. Struggles we had with the front-end included implementing graphs correctly and issues with requests to the backend. Struggles we had with the backend included finding a reliable database and an efficient and helpful API provider. We resolved the graphs issue through learning new graph APIs for Next.js, and resolved the database, API, and request issues through research and trial and error. We tried many different databases and APIs before. We finally found the Open Food Facts API, which was reliable and had all the data we needed which we could get from handling UPC formatted barcode numbers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of self hosting the backend and not relying on external hosting services, self generating the SSL certificates, the minimal cost of deployment of the app, and learning new frontend practices within such a short amount of time. We also believe that this app could be very beneficial in real use cases as holding companies to user-driven accountability, especially with how easy our app is to use.