Recipeazy

Inspiration

Do you ever look at yourself and see: no money, no skills, no job, and no time to plan meals? As university students, we’re no strangers to unhealthy eating habits, wasted food, and wasted money. Indeed, food waste costs the Australian economy $36.6 billion annually, and young adults are amongst the biggest contributors. Our goal is to design a mobile app that helps reduce food waste and cost, all the while making healthy meal plans just a button click away!

What it does

Recipeazy features a modal for you to insert your receipt. You can take a photo of your current receipt or upload a photo of an older receipt and our app will parse the results of the receipt as an ingredient list. Our app then takes those ingredients, your taste, and dietary preferences, and cooks up the perfect recipes that you are able to create using those ingredients.

You’ll be shown a list of recipes you can make, and the option to save it to your Saved Recipes. Saved Recipes is a tab for you to save the most tasty recipes, with the easy ability to click onto the recipe and get a list of steps to follow to re-make the tasty dish. We expect you to go ham on these recipes, so we’ve added the feature to search your saved recipes and then filter by the type of dish you want to enjoy on that day.

How we built it

We built Recipeazy by combining our frustration with food waste and our shared love for solving real-life problems. We used Figma for prototyping and React Native and Expo to create a mobile deployment-ready app.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was parsing the receipts accurately. Sometimes the text recognition would mess up, and we’d end up with weird ingredient lists. Also, integrating the backend with the frontend was tricky – getting the recipe suggestions to load smoothly took a lot of trial and error. Time was another issue; we only had 48 hours, so we had to prioritise features and leave some cool ideas for later.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud of how intuitive the app's UI/UX design turned out. The receipt upload feature works beautifully and demonstrated to us the vast potential for scalability for this app in the future!

What we learned

Balancing design, functionality, and user experience in such a short time was tough but rewarding. Most importantly, we realised how much impact a simple app can have on everyday life – like helping students eat better and waste less food.

What's next for Recipeazy

We didn’t have the most time (in 48 hours) to link to an api, so in the future we’re planning to dynamically load information from the Spoonacular api. This will actually tie the app together!

Additionally, we intend on enhancing the user experience through a healthy food hub for users to share recipes that they’ve discovered using this app, including a discussion section for each recipe to cultivate a sense of community within the app.