WasteLess

WateLess is a smart food scanner that helps households prevent food waste by logging grocery items via barcode, estimating their shelf life with the help of AI, and tracking them instantly

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Inspiration

I'm Steven, a 15-year-old developer from North Texas passionate about using code to solve real-world problems. During the 2025 UNity Hacks, I wanted to build something simple yet meaningful and few issues are more pressing than food waste.

Over 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted each year. A huge portion of that happens in regular households because we forget what we have, buy too much, or don't use food in time.

This project was inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12, specifically Target 12.3: Halve per capita global food waste. I realized if we could give families a simple, camera powered way to track food, we could make waste awareness effortless.

What it does

WasteLess is a web app that turns your smartphone into a smart kitchen assistant.

Scan: Use your phone camera to scan food product barcodes

Auto Lookup: Instantly fetch product details (title, brand, description)

Shelf Life Estimation: Uses AI to estimate how long a product will last

Inventory Tracking: Groups items, shows quantity, and highlights expiring soon

Recipe Generator: Uses OpenAI to suggest recipes based on your pantry

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js 15 App Router + Tailwind CSS + ShadCN UI

Barcode Scanning: html5-qrcode with custom scan throttling

UPC Lookup: Big Product Data API (via RapidAPI proxy)

Shelf Life Estimation: OpenAI API with structured prompt formatting

Recipe Generation: OpenAI function calling to return JSON recipes

Storage: sessionStorage for temp scans, localStorage for inventory

Pages: /scan, /inventory, /suggest-recipes

Challenges we ran into

Camera glitches on mobile Safari when switching routes

Over scanning: the same barcode was firing multiple times per second solved by adding a cooldown

UPC data was inconsistent some products lacked clear descriptions

AI hallucination: GPT often returned unstructured recipe responses until we switched to JSON function calling

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully working AI-powered scanner app in a short time period

Made the entire thing work on mobile browsers without installing an app

Got structured recipes and shelf life estimations using OpenAI API

What we learned

How to use camera APIs and barcode scanning in the browser

How to build fast mobile-first UIs with Tailwind + Next.js

How to structure AI prompts to get consistent results (JSON parsing!)

How important user flow and state management is in scan-based apps

What's next for WasteLess

Notifications for food expiring soon (via Service Workers)

Shopping list generator from missing ingredients

Cloud sync across devices with user login

Category filtering (e.g. dairy, grains, frozen)

PWA support to install WasteLess like a native app

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