Menu4MeNU

Menu4MeNU is a smart recipe, grocery, and meal-planning assistant that helps users save time and eat healthier.

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Inspiration

This project is designed to solve one of the most common daily problems: What do I cook, what do I need to buy, and how can I reach my nutrient goals?

What it does

Menu4MeNU is a smart recipe, grocery, and meal-planning assistant that adapts to real households. It tells you what meals you can cook with what you already have, what meals you should cook based on your nutrition goals, what groceries your household does or doesn't have, and finally keeps all of your favorite meals in one place. We wanted to take the guesswork out of healthy eating by making it easy to find meals based on specific vitamins, minerals, or macros.

How we built it

  • Frontend: Built with TypeScript, HTML, and CSS.
  • Backend: Developed using Java and Spring Boot with a PostgreSQL database.
  • Networking: We used Tailscale to maintain a secure connection between team members during development.
  • User Accounts: Supabase was used to handle user authentication, enabling the "Favorites" and "Shared Household" features.
  • Data: Nutritional information is pulled from the USDA Food Database API.

Challenges we ran into

During this project as most of us were beginners we ran into many challenges.

For the frontend:

  • Quickly learning new languages to create a page we were happy with
  • Getting the USDA food database API information to be displayed in a clean way

For the backend:

  • Learning how Spring Boot worked
  • Connecting to the Tailscale VPN

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all incredibly proud of the final product we were able to develop over these past 3 months. All of us developed so many new skills that will help us in our future education and careers. The success of this hackathon is due to the hard work and time our team and our mentor put in (thank you Hugo!!!).

More specifically, for frontend we're proud of:

  • Developing a clean and easy to use website
  • Using an API to add a new feature

For backend we're proud of:

  • Figuring out how to push stuff to the data base
  • Connecting the frontend pages to the backend apis
  • Accessing the Postgresql database through the backend using Tailscale
  • Integrating the authentication using Supabase

What we learned

This hackathon was an amazing opportunity for all of us to learn many new skills

The front end team learned:

  • How to use TypeScript
  • How to use API's and how they transfer information
  • How to organize and design items on a page
  • How to use GitHub to collaborate on projects

The backend team learned:

  • About Tailscale and using a VPN
  • Full stack and API's
  • PostgreSQL
  • Supabase auth

What's next for Menu4MeNU

To further develop Menu4MeNU, we'd like to continue to add more features, such as:

  • Find the cheapest ingredient in grocery stores near you
  • Create meal plans for each day
  • Implementing web scraping for the price search feature

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