Food Cycling

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High Fidelity Prototype
High Fidelity (Features)
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Recipe Page

Inspiration

Most of the time, it is cheaper to buy the whole chicken rather than breasts only. Though, you don’t want to throw away the rest of the chicken just because you want the breast. What are ways to help people make financially and environmentally-friendly choices?

What it does

Our app is a one-stop solution for people who can creatively use every bit of the food by cooking it, making homemade beauty products out of it, or planting them in their gardens. The app allows users to enter the food items or leftover parts of the food (for ex. After eating orange how its peels can be used, so the user enters orange peels) - based on that, the app suggests recipes, beauty products, and planting tips.

The app considers the cases where people don’t know the name of the leftover food/part (for example: If they don’t have knowledge about different parts of the animal/meat and how it looks) - the app allows them to scan that particular part/item to get more information about it and how it can be used.

Additionally, alerts people of the items/parts that are not edible. The app considers edge cases like allergy alerts. The user can add allergies in the settings and the app would alert them about those specific recipes/products. Our product also believes in sustainable community building and provides people with a platform to share their creations (recipes, beauty products, etc).

Finally, considering money as a big factor for people and how they make decisions based on it - the app provides a point-based system where users could redeem their points at Grocery stores. There are two ways to earn points. Firstly, they can earn points from grocery stores by buying items/ingredients for the recipes (that the app suggests) and secondly, by commenting and sharing their creations and rating others' recipes/products in the community section.

How we built it

We built our app in two iterations. In the first iteration, we collaborated and gained a shared understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. After deciding on the problem statement we ran a brainstorming session that addressed user needs, pain points, goals, and features. We ran this session using Miro whiteboard and created a low-fidelity prototype for our app. For the second iteration, we looked for design inspirations and colour schemes on websites like Dribble and Behance. Finally, after deciding on functionality and components based on our low fidelity prototype and visual elements, we built a high-fidelity prototype using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Going out of topic was something we had to keep in mind. Sometimes we would be so focused on adding more features that we would forget our main goal for the app, but thankfully by working in teams we had teammates reminding each other what the initial goal was. The potentials are unlimited when you create an app from scratch, so we are happy with what we came up with.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

That we were able to work together and bond over the two-day hackathon with people we initially did not know. To some of our team members, it was their first hackathon, so teaching and learning from each other was also something we are proud of.

What we learned

We learned the importance of brainstorming. Brainstorming is often something that people skip when they have a limited amount of time to accomplish something. But thanks to our brainstorming session was done, we had a clearer image as to what we wanted and we were able to do our tasks smoothly and only faced minor issues and changes. We also learned a lot about food waste, which is such a common thing but we had no idea how much it actually affected the earth. From a young age, people are taught that wasting food was bad but we were never taught the actual consequence of food wasting.

What’s next for Food Cycling

The next step for Food Cycling would be to implement it into an app. Features can be added or removed to improve the functionality. Once implemented, it can be released into the app store to gather a community of users. Receiving constant feedback would be important for this app. We also plan to initially fund our app by collaborating with grocery stories (by advertising their products/ingredients on our app) and in return charging a service fee (like delivery apps like UberEats). This will not only help us to raise funds but also get a good understanding of how often users interact with our app, and gain insight on their behaviour (like why and what they purchase) and how they make money decisions.