Inspiration
While platforms like Flipp help users find advertised grocery deals, they have key limitations. They're often cluttered with promotional content and lack intelligent features for cart planning or meal suggestions. As university students, we often juggle affordability, nutrition, and convenience when grocery shopping, but there isn’t one tool that brings all of that together. We wanted to streamline the experience. Nacho Average Cart is designed to turn messy grocery planning into a smarter, more affordable, and more personalized process.
What It Does
Nacho Average Cart is a web application that uses pictures of a grocery list or regular text-based searches to find and match real-time prices from different stores. It also allows users to organize selected items into shopping carts, and then uses Gemini to generate food recipe combinations based on the items in the cart.
How We Built It
We built this application using the MERN stack. MongoDB was used for our database, Express.js handled routing on the backend, React powered the front-end interface, and Node.js served as our runtime environment and package manager.
Challenges We Ran Into
One of the key challenges we faced was working with a front-end template. While we initially tried using a pre-made UI template, we encountered issues hosting it on GitHub due to its large file size. As a result, we decided to build our own UI, which ended up connecting smoothly with our backend. This experience taught us the importance of choosing lightweight and manageable front-end assets.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
We’re especially proud of the fact that we finished on time, even though we started halfway into the hackathon. We initially struggled to come up with a solid idea, but once we settled on one, we were able to execute it and deliver a working project by the deadline.
What We Learned
Throughout this project, we learned how to use the MERN stack effectively. In particular, we gained hands-on experience working with MongoDB, React, Node.js, and Express.js, and learned how to connect these technologies to build a functional full-stack application.
What's Next for Nacho Average Cart
In the future, we plan to expand the app to include all items with Gemini support for answering user questions. We could also explore paid sponsorships and incentives to help scale the project and offer users more value.
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