Greencode

Ever wondered the sustainability behind your favorite snack brands? With Greencode, a quick picture from a smartphone provides an environmental rating as well as ingredients and potential allergens.

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Inspiration

Labels on food or snack products are generally misleading, and consumers can miss important information because it printed too small or represented in a confusing way. Additionally, packaging will generally not provide any information on the ethics or environmental sustainability of the products you are buying.

We created Greencode to help consumers make environmentally-conscious and health-conscious purchasing decisions with very little friction.

With Greencode, people can upload an image of the product with its barcode to a web app, and we will instantly find all of the important information you need to know to make an informed purchase.

What it does

Greencode will let you upload an image of your choice, from either your computer or your phone, and search for all of the information that we deemed to be most important. These include:

  • The company and product names.
  • The food group the product is part of.
  • The carbon footprint (in kg) to produce the product.
  • An formulated eco-score, based on transportation, a forest score, and a package sustainability.
  • A nutrition score based on the FSAm-Npm score standard set by the World Health Organization.
  • A health score based on the amount of processing done to the snack item.
  • Potential allergens.
  • An ingredient list, showing the top ingredients by weight in the product.

How we built it

  • React
  • Webpack
  • Styled Components
  • Font-Awesome Icons

We used data from Open Food Facts to calculate our scores and to determine ingredients and allergens.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was the compatibility of the barcode scanner we were using. We decided to use the one that was built directly into Javascript, but we found out that there were issues with compatibility between devices, operating systems, and browsers. In the future this would be something to re-implement with a different API or library.

Beyond the barcode scanning, another challenge was simply the quality of the data we were receiving through the API. For some products there was a lot of documentation in the dataset we were pulling from, but due to the crowdsourced contributions to open food facts, some of the data could either be incomplete or incorrect. In the end we decided to simply use the data from open food facts in order to keep the scope of the project within reason.

Additionally the styling and organization of how we provided the information in our website was something that was much discussed. However, we believe we found a medium between providing the user as much information about the product, while not providing an overwhelming amount, which may turn users away.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how well our product works. There is a very low error rate, and nearly every error is due to an API inconsistency. We believe that GreenCode is a very polished product given our timeframe.

We were also proud of the variety of tech tools we were able to use to create this application. We developed much more of an expertise in how to use OCR to detect UPC (barcode) data, and use this data in a useful way.

This was Jack and Ravi's first hackathon, which makes us even more pleased with our performance. We're happy with how the team was able to work together so seamlessly to create such a demonstrably useful tool.

What we learned

  • On the technical side, we learned about how to use some JavaScript modules which were less familiar to us, such as OCR.
  • We were able to grow as a team to collaborate more effectively.
  • We were able to improve our efficiency at writing JavaScript, and at writing code collaboratively.

What's next for Greencode

Going forward, we plan on:

  • Continuing to broaden the number of devices which support our software.
  • Expanding our data sources; looking into first-party crowdsourced nutrition and environmental data and creating an information advantage.
  • Continuing to refine the core technology platform to appeal to shoppers.
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