Inspiration
We feel that people are not aware of potential savings of cooking at home. We wanted to build a tool that lets users see something they want, and know what they need to make it with one click. This tool will find the best possible price, balancing the cost of the ingredients and travel cost to the nearest supermarket. We want to incentivize home cooking by saving users time and money.
What it does
Praisal is a browser extension that reads webpage content, ideally a recipe, and generates a list of ingredients. The ingredients are passed to an API to get ingredient prices and proximity to the user. We list the ingredients, sum their prices, and display relative savings for buying in bulk.
Recipes from pages can be saved locally or with Google sync, so they can be recalled later.
How we built it
We used a detailed grocery API, which matches ingredients with prices. The Chrome extension is built using the Chrome API and vanilla JavaScript.
Challenges we ran into
The food API we used is not one of the APIs offered by Hack Western. They give limited API requests and we would have needed to pay for consistent access. Getting the prices for each individual ingredients counts as API request, so we would run out of available requests during the demo. In order to solve this problem, we designed our project so it's compatible with the API for the future, but we substituted the API with a mock API written using Express.js, to demonstrate functionality without the "ideal" software architecture.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have a demo-able product that shows people what they need to know and why it's useful.
What we learned
We learned about focusing on what's important. With limited time and resources, we built a lightweight app that demonstrates the key idea we want to pitch. Chrome extensions are essentially webpages.
What's next for Praisal
Praisal could be fully integrated with a food API, for more robust ingredient matching and an enormous database of prices and nearby locations to choose from. In that case, API requests must be optimized. It's too expensive to retrieve "eggs" over and over.
The next "core" feature would be to add grocery planning over time. The Chrome extension should allow users to maintain a grocery list. This would fully realize the extension's goal of automating grocery shopping.
The extension could use machine learning to become more literate online and read recipes on blogs more accurately.
We may also add optional parameters for food qualities (organic, vegan, etc).
This tool could potentially be integrated with an online supermarket such as Amazon Pantry. The summary provided by the tool could be ordered online with one click for an instant home cooking package delivery request.
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