Recip-Ease | Devpost

Inspiration

In a nation where schedules are stringent and time management is essential, it can be a chore to keep track of the shelf lives of all of your food and to come up with new and different ways to prepare it. So in response, many simply don't keep track, and much of this food gets thrown out and wasted, scaling into a nationwide problem of food waste. Our website, "Recip-Ease", attempts to tackle this issue by giving consumers an easy way of tracking the shelf lives of their products and even supplying them with new and interesting ways to prepare them!

What it does

You can enter the name of a food, and it takes in the time you entered it to calculate an estimate of when it’ll go bad. Once a food has been added, you can click the recipes button, and 5 will be generated for you based on the foods you added. You can click on the item to remove it if it’s been eaten.

How we built it

We used an existing to-do list created using React to form the base of our code. From there, we edited some parts of the functionality based on what we’d learned so that the code better suited our needs. We had a few notable changes. When creating the list, we added code that calculated the date your food would go bad. A function pinged the API and caused the screen to display a list of recipes.

Challenges we ran into

Getting started off to create the project was one of the hardest challenges. The group had little experience in web development, and this was the first time we all had participated in hackathon. After reading through the Bits of Good guide, we were able to construct a basic outline of the site and generate outputs for food. Implementing the Spoonacular API was another large problem. With the help of our mentor, we were able to find the documentation of the API and implement that into our site so that it could output the recipes possible given the inputs from the user

Accomplishments that we are proud of

All of it :) We’re specifically very proud of the implementation of an API, as we have extremely little experience with APIs and website development. Our progress with understanding JavaScript, Git, and React was also superb, and none of us expected to have a program this robust by this stage.

What we learned

We essentially learned general details involving web design since we all had little experience in creating websites. Through the past 24 hours we had learned how to start out websites and create headers, get a response from users, and implement an API that took the responses and generated another output.

What’s next for Recip-Ease

To make the site more functional, we want to actually add links to the site, since the API gives us the information needed to create links. The issue was that we didn’t have the time to learn how to extract the information and put it into a link format. If we had more time, we also would have improved the appearance of the current site, and made it more user friendly. We would also like to add the ability to send notifications to the user, and perhaps in the future even move the format over to an app. This would include allowing for separate accounts to be made, so the information can be saved and even shared across platforms. A larger database for food spoilage times would also be essential for future growth.