Love @ First Bite

A dating app for restaurants! Find the foods you love without the need to think!

Comment

Inspiration

A city’s community is best shown through their food, and what better way to express that, but through an app that connects the local & minority owned businesses to the heart of their city, while also being an engaging and interactive experience for the customer.

We were inspired by the struggle of finding new restaurants and local businesses in our area. Not only that but, it is not that uncommon where we are stun locked by analysis paralysis. Deciding where to go out and eat with our friends and family has never been an easy task. Therefore, to knock out both issues, we developed an app that is both convenient as well as supports our community. With a fun twist, we took inspiration for dating apps such as Tinder, and it would match customers to restaurants instead of matching people.

What it does

This app is essentially a dating app for finding restaurants. We structured it incredibly similar to Tinder, because we wanted it to have an intuitive UI with left swipes being dislikes and right swipes being likes that would match you to a restaurant suiting your preferences. At the same time, it would prioritize local and minority-owned businesses. A user would look at the food pictures located within a restaurant's profile, and swipe based on that. To make sure that we are recommending the right restaurants, we ask the user 3 questions whenever they log onto the app:

  • Select what cuisines you’re interested in.
  • How hungry are you?
  • How much do you want to spend?

These three questions will allow us to narrow down their options, so that they only have to go through a couple restaurants before we narrow their choices to the one that they will love.

How we built it

We built this app in React-Native, with Google Firebase as our backend database. We used a multitude of dependencies within ReactNative, and we even made some of our own components.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many, many challenges with ReactNative’s dependency installs, and making sure that all of us on the team had the same dependencies so we could all run the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re incredibly proud of finishing a working app. We’ve all never worked in ReactNative before, and we are also very new to app development. We’re also proud that we managed to hook up a database to our app using Firebase, as we’ve never created a completely full stack application before.

What we learned

We learned Firebase, ReactNative, and ReactJS! This was also most of the group’s first time coding seriously with JavaScript.

What's next for Love @ First Bite

We have some pretty ambitious ideas, and here are the most notable:

  • Letting businesses set up their own profile, that allows them to verify their information, as well as post interesting updates, such as holiday specials.
  • A better recommendation algorithm, that actually tracks users interests over time. We want to see how an AI could help us with this part.
Share this project:

Updates