MnjamMnjam

Inspiration

The idea of the app starts from some vegetables that stayed too long in our fridge and went bad. We wanted to have one app that records our fridge status and remind us about food ingredients that we need to consume in time. Later it got developed to generate recipes according to our food storage and personal interests, due to Covid 19, cooking becomes the main activity for many people.

The online recipes often have too many ingredients that not avaliable right now. We want to use this app to help people make efficient decisions about what to cook.

What it does

We built a web app that recommends recipes to the user based on available ingredients and user's preferences. User can swipe recipes in a tinder style to the left or right, eventually finding a match based on the ingredients at your home. Further, users can add new items to available ones simply by either scanning barcodes of the products, or scanning the products themselves and can obtain nutritional scores about the items. Based on given preferences defined in the app, matches are selected by e.g. your goal to get healthier by eating less fats or your choice of cooking more challenging recipes.

How we built it

We started off with a simple story, to understand better who Bob is and what Bob needs. Bob is you and just wants to know what he can cook from the stuff on his fridge and adapt his meals to his preferences. We decided to develop a web app for our purposes and chose django framework with mongoDB as the database. We utilized the APIs for food recognition and barcode scanning that were provided during hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team members had much experience with web app development, nor with available frameworks. It turned out to be challenging to solve problems on our way while learning at the same time, given the short time. Our team was split between onsite and remote participation and that was also not easy to keep each other perfectly in a loop, or brainstorm effectively via videochat.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Despite that, we were happy to have learnt a lot, explore the world of web development, accomplished our minimal viable product and most of all had fun that we participated for!

Built With

Submitted to

HackZurich 2020

Created by

I worked on the barcode scanning app and on food detection method to add ingredients to our data base with the ease of use in mind, thereby using the API provide by CSS, AUTO-ID LABS, CAREUM and UNIVERSITY OF ST. GALLEN. Furthermore, I extended the frontend design, streamlined parts of the navigation and put lose ends together.

I had a lot of fun creating my first full fledged Django app with a wonderful, creative and hard working team. I learned a lot during the 2 days of Hackathon and in the preparation time in advance.

Heiko Donat
I worked on the swiping functionality (both initial frontend and entire swiping backend, including choosing which card to show next), converting recipes into swiping cards, connecting our apps via a navbar, a recipe/ingredient overview list, show detail of recipe/ingredient, and on early-on and repeatedly merging all our branches together. I also drew a quick yellow cat face sketch, not expecting it will end up being our logo.

It was my first time doing Web Development, and I taught myself Django, HTML, and CSS from scratch a few days before the hackathon. It also had been years since I last wrote something with a GUI. Working with an unfamiliar tech stack and being the only remote team member was a double challenge.

Sarah Lutteropp
Private user
Qiusha Fan