Inspiration
As students coming from all different backgrounds, we have all experienced that pang of hunger and the multiple ensuing trips to the fridge and pantry, opening and closing the door because "nothing is there" but we're hoping something could appear. Feeding yourself is tough, especially if you're new to cooking and grocery shopping, and we wanted to help make it easier.
What it does
MealHub is a service that helps create a personalized meal plan just for you and your needs. Just tell us your dietary restrictions, the cuisines you love, and what days you think you have time to cook, and we'll provide you with a meal plan for the week and a shopping list so you know exactly how much to buy for what. No more spoiled leftovers!
You can take MealHub's suggestions as is or switch things around at any point in time by adding meals, swapping them out, or getting a whole new randomized meal plan. And if you find you loved anything you cooked and tried, you can save those recipes for future reference and plans!
How we built it
MealHub is a full-stack application built with React.js and Tailwind in the frontend and a MongoDB database. The two are connected with a Python Flask API. MealHub uses the Spoonacular API to find recipes from the web. We leveraged the strength of TempoLabs to speed up front-end development as well as the Python libraries and DBMS provided by MongoDB Atlas for a secure and reliable database perfect for our application's needs.
Challenges we ran into
Since we weren't all familiarized with the Spoonacular API, MongoDB Atlas, or Flask APIs, we ran into a lot of challenges creating the backend logic to support the frontend. Additionally, we spent some time learning how to use TempoLabs, but after we were helped by the co-founder, it ended up saving us lots of time!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of creating an aesthetic UI and a robust custom API for our users that we feel really has the opportunity to help people when the final features or completed. We're also proud of collaborating and completing our first in-person hackathons, as 3 of us are brand new to them!
What we learned
We learned the importance of shrinking down the problem definition and solution to its highest priority attributes in order to best ensure success! Technologically speaking, we learned the strength of external tools to help boost our productivity when coding.
What's next for MealHub
We'd love to implement a machine learning algorithm that helps extrapolate out steps from your meal plan that can be prepared ahead of time to make meal planning and prepping even easier!
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.