Nosh

Nosh is an online platform for sharing dining spots friendly for people with any food hypersensitivity.

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Inspiration

Food hypersensitivity (egg allergy, celiac disease, food intolerances, etc.) represent a growing global health issue. A study shows that 9.72% of the general population have some food sensitivities or allergies – that’s over 800 million people worldwide, including here in Indonesia.

This demographic has to adapt to survive, by picking and filtering out foods that may trigger their hypersensitivities. One of our team member's father returned from the doctor's four years ago after being told to avoid gluten. Going out to eat together as a family has become a struggle for them, as they have to choose places that offer gluten-free options (or do not use ANY ingredients with gluten in the kitchen, to avoid cross contamination!) and even more so when they travel to new, unfamiliar places.

While these people can continue to prepare and cook for themselves, wouldn’t it be a little bit empowering to make food more accessible – for them to be able to eat out, and feel normal, for once? This is the challenge we sought to answer with Nosh.

What it does

Nosh is an online platform for sharing dining spots friendly for people with any food hypersensitivity. In this mobile-first web prorotype, we have three main features:

1) Proximity Discovery – you can use our interactive map, powered by Google Maps API, to find the nearest destinations that other users have added!

2) AI Discovery – ask our Cohere-powered AI chatbot to find destinations according to your needs, and it will retrieve the most suitable destinations it can find!

3) Reviews – you can read other users' reviews or add your own to an existing destination. Share about whether the food was safe for you, and what food sensitivity options others can expect!

How we built it

We started building using a fullstack NextJS application on one single repository. Our engineers trailed the UI/UX designer on the front-end as she finished one page design at a time, while on the back-end we worked throughout the whole project integrating with the frontend, the database, Google Maps API, and Cohere API.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few concerns on the product design:

  • How specific or how broad should each food sensitivity tag be (e.g. low FODMAP, paleo diet friendly, gluten-free options vs. wheat-free, pork-free, caffeine-free)
  • Integrating with the Google Maps API was a new challenge for us
  • One of our members had a fever throughout the hackathon :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We managed to successfully create a functioning interactive map that connects with the saved destinations in our DB.
  • An AI chatbot featuring RAG!!
  • Dividing the tasks among the team and managing our very limited 36 hours to finish everything

What we learned

  • We learned a lot about food hypersensitivities, like the variety of allergies and intolerances there are
  • We learned about the capability of Cohere AI's RAG and Ranking APIs, as well as the complexity of the Google Maps API

What's next for Nosh

  • Admin Moderation for user Reviews and Destinations
  • Admin Verification for user Destinations, to allow owners to add their own restaurants
  • A full for-desktop website (and not just a mobile-first website)

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