Chew Chew

Inspiration

Food insecurity is the lack of consistent access to nutritious meals of sufficient quality and/or quantity.
Nowadays, with high inflation rates, the cost of living- and particularly, eating, is higher than ever.
On our university campus alone, our school’s food bank saw an almost 500% increase in visits compared to pre-pandemic levels. 35% of our undergraduate students experience food insecurity.
Some of the best ways to address food insecurity amongst students are:
- Financial aid and assistance programs
- Food pantries and food banks
- Food drives, fundraisers, vouchers or discounts
- Education and outreach
Although major changes to address student food insecurity come at the institutional level, our project creates an online student community centered around reducing food waste by making and sharing nutritious meals. ## What it does
Introducing Chew Chew, a website aimed to support students facing food insecurity in two major ways.
First, Chew Chew allows students efficiently utilize their food by letting them input leftover ingredients they have on hand and generating recipe suggestions for those ingredients. By doing this, we enable students in reducing food waste and learning recipes for nutritious, home-cooked meals.
Second, Chew Chew’s Food Forum promotes meal sharing- both socially and physically. Students can view and share posts of their home-cooked meals in an online community.
Ever been to an event with way too many leftovers? Chew Chew also enables on-campus organizations to distribute their extra event meals to students, reducing food waste and putting good food in the hands of hungry student. ## How we built it
Our project uses a FERN stack (Firebase, Express, React and Node.js)
Along with some APIs - Spoonicular, OpenAI and Firebase
Front-end was designed and built with Chakra UI ## Challenges we ran into
First time incorporating Firebase for the first time to store user data
Implementing a forum page where users can make posts
Lack of sleep ## Accomplishments that we're proud of
Finishing the project!! (Wahoo!!)
Stepping out of our comfort zone and trying different things
Great design and super cute branding (can you tell who's writing this?) ## What's next for Chew Chew
Allowing users to tailor their recipe suggestions with food intolerances, personal preferences, time limits or equipment available
Creating additional safety guidelines or a verification process to account creation