Kitchen Helper

Perishable food items are often forgotten in the back of the fridge or pantry. This app allows users to scan receipts to enter items, and notifies the user when food items are close to expiring.

Comment

Inspiration

We've all had the experience where food was forgotten about, only to be discovered later long past its expiration, requiring it to be thrown out. Getting reminders when food items are close to expiring and need to be used can help ensure that less goes to waste.

What it does

The user can scan a receipt into the app and the app logs the items and their estimated expiration date. The user can also manually add in items and expiration dates. The app will notify the user once per day about the items they have that are close to expiration.

How we built it

We used expo to develop the app. The estimated expiration dates are from the US government's food safety data.

Challenges we ran into

No one on the team had much experience building a mobile app using react, so it took a while for people to setup and learn how to use Expo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that the app can read the text from a receipt fairly well. Also, the app is able to send notifications and take pictures with the user's camera.

What we learned

A lot about frontend development and React. And breaking node

What's next for Kitchen Helper

Refining the receipt scanning to work with worse pictures and adding recipe suggestions based on the items that are near expiration.

Share this project:

Updates