Food Pal

Food Pal is a mobile app that aims to combat the imminent environmental threat that is food waste by providing a digital fridge that tracks food expirations and provides alternatives to use food.

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Inspiration

In today's fast-paced and digital society, almost everything is tracked through mobile or on online means. However, when it comes to food, it is often tedious and difficult or the technology simply doesn't exist when it comes to tracking food waste and intake. This is extremely detrimental to our environment as food waste is valued at over $218 billion a year in the US alone, which is over 40 million tons, or 35% of all our food which takes up more space in landfills than any other material. Two of the leading causes are a misunderstanding of expiration labels and/or signs, and excess food with subpar means of keeping track of them.

What it does

Food Pal is an app that provides users with a digital fridge that tracks and educates on everything you need to know about food waste. The features of food pal include:

  1. A seamless system to enter food with its accompanying expiration date
  2. Recommended recipes based on the food you have and ones closer to expiring
  3. An image classification model that detects whether fruits or vegetables are still good to eat and for how long

How we built it

We built this using Swift and Xcode, Figma, CreateML, and the Spoonacular API

Challenges we ran into

The spoonacular API was a challenging one to use as it did not have an SDK for iOS development using Swift. Therefore, we had to manually build functions that called for the specific information we needed from the API. In addition, Due to our outdated Xcode, it did not support the usage of a physical camera to detect images in the ML model, thus we created a way for the user to take a picture and then upload it to the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We used SwiftUI and CreateML for the first time

What we learned

What's next for Food Pal

Currently, Food Pal is built for a family or individual use. In the future, we hope to expand our target audience to food banks, orphanages, hotels, and other places with large amounts of food so we can prevent food waste on a larger scale.

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