Recipeace

Main Application Page
The user's environmental footprint in the last year
Recipe Search
Replace some ingredients with more sustainable choices

Inspiration

Earth Overshoot Day is the day of the year when humanity has consumed more resources than earth can regenerate within that year. Every year, tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases are released during food production and transport. Industrial nations are consuming more resources than is sustainable, and water scarcity is becoming a problem in more and more places. We were looking for a solution that everyone would enjoy while working toward saving the environment. We noticed that many people look up recipes on the internet before cooking something, which is why we believe this would be a good occasion to encourage more sustainable behavior, as opposed to patronizing after they are already done cooking. People will always be going to restaurants, however, so we still wanted to allow someone to take a photo of their food.

What it does

Recipeace allows you to search for recipes online. Once you’ve selected one, it suggests similar ingredients that can be exchanged to make the meal more sustainable. In addition, it can take a photo of your food and match it to a meal in order to add it to your diary and allowing suggestion of alternatives for future meals. Recipeace also collects comprehensive statistics about your progress toward sustainability, summarizing greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide equivalents, water wasted and energy consumed over the past months, not only as the pure figures, but also as metaphors from the daily life. As a motivation, your consumption calculates your personal Earth Overshoot Day per week and per year to show you, how many figurative earths could be saved from the food patterns.

How we built it

The app has been implemented as a Progressive Web App, making it more accessible to any type of user. The backend was written in Django, and makes requests to Spoonacular for fetching ingredients and recipes. Scanning images of food was accomplished using the Google Vision API.

Challenges we ran into

There are not many free APIs for recipes, so it was hard to collect everything we needed.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We believe we have developed a solution that can truly change the environment for the better. Our solution raises awareness for the issue without talking down to the user.

What we learned

There is nothing we can’t accomplish as a team. :)

What’s next for Recipeace

Recipeace needs a more comprehensive database of recipes with all the environmental impacts of many more ingredients. Also nutrition values and help from export in that field would also make the app more desirable for its users. The more time is put into it, the more engaging it will get!