BetterCart

Inspiration

In the earlier years of our lives, half of the members of our team struggled with the pandemic of childhood chubbiness. As a result, this led them to develop a focus on nutrition and a desire to better understand the nutritional value of ingredients as they grew older. However, they realized that identifying healthy options can be a challenge, especially when navigating the endless aisles of the grocery store. That's where BetterCart comes in - the ultimate solution to this problem. With BetterCart, you can easily and efficiently find healthier alternatives to your favorite ingredients and food items, all while gaining a deeper understanding of the nutritional value of the foods you consume.

What it does

BetterCart is an intelligent grocery assistant that instantly provides healthier alternatives to items in your shopping cart! Simply add an item to your shopping cart and BetterCart will utilize its expansive database to provide alternative recommendations with higher nutritional value.

We leveraged the Nutri-Score, an A-E scale developed by the World Health Organization to provide a simplistic translation of the nutritional value and composition of the ingredients.

How we built it

We utilized Django and Django's built-in ORM system as our backend framework to organize and interact with data. For the frontend, we used HTML and CSS to create the visual layout and structure of our application. We leveraged two open-source datasets for the functionality of the application, an alternative food study dataset, and a USDA nutriscore dataset.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges encountered during the course of the project primarily stemmed from the utilization of the Django framework. A significant portion of our team, with the exception of one member, had limited exposure to working with Django, particularly at such a scale. As a result, we encountered a steep learning curve, which resulted in a significant amount of trial-and-error experimentation during the initial phase of the project in areas such as ORM, migrations, and database access. However, our team members, through the help of each other as well as independent learning, were able to ultimately overcome these challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

When coming into this project only one of us members had experience creating a website using Django and none of us had a vast knowledge of databases. However, throughout this project, we were effectively able to use online resources and intuition to put together a working and effective website. We are very proud that we were able to navigate these new platforms and learn new skills and ultimately creating an overall project we are proud of.

What we learned

Through this experience, our team gained significant technical experience in Django, frontend development and design, and version control. Additionally, we also learned crucial lessons in collaborative development.

What's next for BetterCart

There is definitely a future in the development of BetterCart. One significant aspect we would love to integrate is nutrition facts such as fats, carbs, and more. We would also like to implement a "Finalize" page, which would describe the calories saved and the nutritional value gained from the utilization of our application.