Inspiration
People often buy groceries in bulk, resulting in excess food items that they may not need and often end up throwing away, contributing to a significant amount of food waste. We aimed to address this issue in both waste and financial management.
What it does
Our web application helps reduce food waste by allowing the community to share unused food items that were bought in bulk. Items are canned food, dry fruit, frozen food and so on.
How we built it
We used Flask for our backend and React with Tailwind CSS for our frontend. We have dbsqlite for database.
Challenges we ran into
We were not sure what the best way to verify purchases of bulk food items could be, that is quick and automated. Deciding upon little details in the user-interface to make user experience engaging and inviting. Implementation of a feature that enables users to reserve food items and update the database accordingly and correctly. Merge conflicts a classic.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A robust backend that streamlines exchange of information. We translated our Figma designs into a captivating user interface, leveraging our research on current market trends to ensure an appealing and contemporary user experience. We implemented features that allow purposeful user engagement like reserving food items, uploading of individual food items to the application, interactive user features to add or remove items to reserve, utilizing AI API to provide verification of user uploads of food receipts.
What we learned
We learned quite a few things: Full-Stack development in a team environment with distributed roles and responsibilities. Front-end development flows from Figma designs to production. Integration of front-end to backend using applicable requests to the server. Effectively create and query from and to database models. Incorporating technologies and frameworks like TailwindCSS and Flask with React. Utilizing Mindee OCR API to read product data from receipts.
What's next for Bulkbuddies
The roadmap is as follows: An interactive map that shows central locations for drop off/pick up. Ability to share food items, discussion posts from the marketplace to different platforms to increase user interactions.
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