Hack The Meal

Home Page
Upload Food Image
Uploaded Image
Loading Recipe
Identified Food Item
Generated Recipe

Inspiration

Food waste is a waste of resources, time, and money. It has been a significant issue in almost every country. With food insecurity spreading to hundreds of millions around the world, addressing food waste is a critical issue for creating low-impact, healthy, and resilient food systems. Reducing food waste provides multifaceted gains for people, the planet, and prosperity. It improves food security, addresses the global problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, and reduces the burden on waste management systems. We need collective efforts and a more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient food system to make real changes. Reducing food waste at all levels can have significant environmental, social, and economic benefits. Thus, we come up with a website, Hack the Meal to provide users with amazing recipes from some leftover foods as a primary ingredient.

What it does

The website allows the user to commence by uploading a photo of any leftover food. It then identifies the food item and provides the user with a delicious recipe with the leftover as a primary ingredient.

How we built it

The first in making this project was designing the interface of our website. This was done on Canva. After that came the step of researching about how to identify an image using Python. Here, we discovered a lot of new features and libraries of Python that were quite advanced for us. We read up on those features to discern their application. Once the Object-detection was done, we learned about how to connect our Python file to the front-end using the Flask library of Python. Simultaneously, we started to create the Front-end upon deciding what features and pages we can add to Hack the Meal and ended up including several attributes to the project like giving the user an interactive interface, allowing the user to upload an image of a leftover food item after which Hack the Meal would identify the image and return the name of the ingredient, along with that provide with a recipe made from that Ingredient that would be generated using an API. All this was done with equal contributions from each member of the team.

Challenges we ran into

It was new for us to be working with Flask in python, so there were some difficulties we faced in that area, along with that Object-Detection in python involved knowledge about some advanced libraries of Python, for eg: Tensorflow, so again it was a strenuous activity to learn about those libraries and then implement those in our code.
Working on a project, online with a team is still a perplexity we were facing as we don't have much experience working under such a pressure-inducing situation. Even though GitHub helped a lot in collaborating with each other and allowed us to work together on the code and Front-end. Online communication is still not much efficient but we know that with time and participating in such hackathons will teach us how to deal with such situations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We overcame the above-mentioned challenges, and that too with good time management. We worked together in a team, where everyone was efficient and worked hard for the project, so the end result was awe-inspiring. We feel proud to say that this was the first time we worked with Flask along with the Python libraries required to make the project and were able to produce a remarkable result through it. Despite the difficulties, successfully completing the project in the given period of time is one of the biggest accomplishments we could have accomplished in this hackathon and we are proud of that.

What we learned

Fearlessly trying out new technologies, we have not been very much efficient with advanced python and its concepts but still learned to keep believing in the process of exploring, learning, and implementing with patience, confidence, and energy. Time management is something that we will eventually learn, but through this event, we got some idea on how to prioritize the work to manage time. We learned how to work under pressure. Teamwork was also an important lesson through this. We learned how to analyze expertise of each other, we learned many new technical concepts while working with each other. Along with that, we got to know a lot from each other’s experiences. Patience and calmness are the keys in such a pressure-inducing situation, believing in ourselves and backing each other are very important and that is what helped and motivated us to keep on working on the project and not lose hope against the fear of failure.

What's next for Hack The Meal

We would like to take our project further by including new functionalities like:

Including more food items in the food dataset for making the project work more accurately and efficiently.
Deploying the project after the above change. Along with that, participating in this hackathon boosted the confidence of our team. Now, we feel strong enough to compete and go for more such challenges and face them fearlessly. And hopefully, our future road is embarked with much more achievements.