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Nutribites
Inspiration
Does this sound familiar to you -- college students rush from one building to another skipping lunch just to be on time? This problem inspired us to build Nutribites, a healthy food ordering platform for busy college students. Nutribites is interested in providing tight schedule students affordable nutritious food while they are on campus so that they will not have to skip meals to ease their financial stress and have sufficient time for resting and extracurricular.
What it does
This application allows students to order their lunch online, schedule their pick-up, and have the food delivered to any pick-up spots around campus. Moreover, they can customize their meals according to their lifestyles. To incentivize students to eat healthily, we have a reward system that gives coins to users when they order healthy food or deliver food for their peers.
How I built it
We use HTML, CSS, and Javascript to develop our web application.
Challenges I ran into
Despite how interesting this problem is, we hesitated to choose this problem for our project since we had many other ideas in mind. We also spent a lot of time deciding the scope of this project. In addition, a healthy cafeteria platform that requires collaborations from several sectors on the campus. However, we decided to move forward with this idea since we believe that this common issue needs to be addressed.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We spent the first three hours to brainstorm and pin down the problem and the scope of our project. In addition, it is incredibly challenging to come up with a unique solution. Nevertheless, we are proud that the problem that we are tackling is very relevant to us all, and we hope that the issue will be solved in the near future.
What I learned
After the discussion about which “cutting-edge” technology stack to use, we went back to the fundamental one as it is more important to develop a product that actually works rather than a product that uses the latest technology. In fact, we learned to solve the most complex part of our problem, humans, without any cutting-edge technology but using just an incentive. Our application will not only give benefits to the students but also help merchants by giving them the ability to predict demands and create more revenue.
What's next for Nutribites
Even though our application is still a prototype built on fundamental web technology, we strongly believe that it has a great foundation for the integration of other technologies, such as machine learning. Our application can give a meal suggestion that is customized to those individual customers. Indeed, we can use reinforcement learning to not only give the menu that customers like but also maximize the nutrients. Moreover, there are the benefits that entail the use of machine learning. Firstly, Merchant can use the power of the predictive model to prepare the food even before users order it. This will help them prepare for massive quantities ordering and stocking large quantities of ingredients. Secondly, the platform owner will benefit from students’ nutrition level data. E.g., the university can plan out classes so that the cafeterias are not overcrowded.
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