EcoPantry | Devpost

Inspiration

In 2017, Canadians have thrown away 63% of the food that could have been eaten. We often end up buying or cooking too much and letting perfectly edible food go to waste. It happens to the best of us: at some point, we all forgot to look at the produce at the back of the refrigerator and had an unpleasant surprise a few weeks later. To prevent these regrettable incidents, we wanted to keep users mindful of the content of their inventory. You’ll finally know what to do with that extra loaf of bread you got for that 2 for 1 deal!

What it does

You can add as many ingredients as you want in the list, as well as the expiration date of each of them. You can also delete any listed items with a single swipe of the finger. If you want to use up specific ingredients in the list, you can select them and generate recipe ideas!

How we built it

We programmed the app in Dart, using the Flutter SDK to build the user interface. We set up a database to store all the ingredients using CockroachDB. The recipes ideas are generated with the Spoonacular API.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team members had any experience coding mobile applications and we had no idea Dart and Flutter existed before friday. It was a big struggle to set up Flutter and we had a lot of technical problems with Android SDK and the Android emulators (we probably spent more time troubleshooting than actually developing the platform...) :’) We also had problems with linking the database with the client side.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After five hours of brainstorming, as well as a few hours before the hackathon began, we are proud to say that we found a pretty good idea that can be very useful for everybody. Even if we faced many seemingly unsolvable problems, we are proud to say we didn’t give up. We also used completely new technologies for the whole project: shooting for the stars! The UI is pretty good looking too ;) Most importantly, we won at least one raffle per person, that’s a cool thing to be proud of. (uber eats coupons ftw)

What we learned

This weekend was the first time we heard about Flutter and Dart. Limited by a 48 hour challenge, we didn’t have time to follow an in-depth tutorial. We had to learn by searching up every feature we wanted to implement. We also learned how to use Spoonacular, a food API.

What's next for EcoPantry

In the near future, we are planning to add some new features to encourage you to not forget and use the bits and scraps in your pantry or your fridge. Adding a camera feature to recognize and add the ingredient quicker, you will be able to go through your groceries way faster by simply taking a picture and adding it to your list. We are thinking of using Google Cloud Vision for this recognition feature. We are also planning on sorting ingredients according to their expiration dates and prioritizing recipes that use ingredients on the verge of going bad. We also want to build a web application that allows you to browse the recipes on a bigger screen. Finally, we plan on adding a notification option that will send you a notification when one of your ingredients will expire soon.