Inspiration
We came into the hackathon set on pursuing the sustainability track, and were ideally looking for a project idea that could equally showcase all our team members strengths and abilities—coding and design. While we juggled around a couple ideas, we ultimately came down to the concept of Pantrio, inspired by our personal experiences struggling to reduce food waste as college students. It’s hard to track your grocery pantry as a college student, and it’s even harder to find a way to use most, if not all, your items before their expiration dates. After landing on this shared problem scope, we all collectively decided to pursue the idea of Pantrio as it’s not only addressing something close and integral to our daily lives, but also checked off most of our hackathon-goals.
What it does
Pantrio is an app that promotes zero waste for food. By adding ingredients you already have from your pantry and fridge, Pantrio will generate recipes in order to help you use up most of those ingredients. Not only does Pantrio find these recipes, but it also encourages users to explore these recipes with friends. Maybe you are missing a specific ingredient, but your friend has it in their Pantrio. Pantrio will find recipes that use up ingredients collaboratively to create zero waste and encourage community through cooking.
How we built it
After brainstorming and initial ideation, we settled on creating a prototype of the app and analyzing the recipe data. Figma was used to prototype the UI/UX, React and Supabase were used for full-stack development, and Python and SQL were used for data analysis. Our process for both the design and coding was straightforward: brainstorm, implement, review, and repeat until we got a product we were satisfied with.
Challenges we ran into
A challenge we had to navigate was understanding how to work in a team, as we were strangers (now friends) who had just met, and did not know each others’ working styles at all. Although everyone had their strong suits within the team, the project really challenged us to make sure that we always stayed on the same page by communicating through our work.
Another major challenge we ran into from the very beginning was settling on not only a solid idea, but its locking down the idea’s functionalities and making sure that the user flow, logically, made sense. Making the “perfect” app to solve all your solutions is impossible, especially given the short-timeframe and resources we had at hand, but we found ourselves repeatedly falling into the rabbit hole of rethinking and tweaking our idea until our perfectionist minds could be satisfied. At one point, our scrapped ideas and new ideas became jumbled, and everyone was on different pages of what the app could actually do. This was also largely due to how we were discussing an idea that was grounded in hypotheticals, neither written down on paper nor visualized. Thus, we decided that our first priority was to be at a mutual understanding of all concepts and app functionalities, and tried our best to effectively communicate—whether that be sketching possible screens on our iPads or writing down every single functionality the app would be capable of.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment that we are proud of is how we filtered through the dataset. The initial dataset we used had over 2.2 million entries, however, some were incomplete and inadequate for our use. Using Python and Pandas, we were able to filter our new dataset to about 110,000 recipe data points. Another accomplishment we are proud of is the completion of an initial UI platform plus more. We were initially striving for mockups for our four main pages, but with extra time and ambition, we were set to create more potential functionalities for the app, such as pop-up windows.
What we learned
As we were beginner hackers, we learned how to work on a large-scale project in a short period of time collaboratively. Although our team has had some experience in coding front-end and designing UI/UX platforms, having to work between the two disciplines was a new concept for us. By working on this project and delegating tasks, we also improved our individual skill sets in our assigned software.
What's next for Pantrio
There are many features we still want to add to Pantrio to expand its reach. Potential features we discussed include creating a more elaborate budget calculator for future grocery purchases and adding more filter options, such as expiration date priority, to curate more individualized recipe lists. As this is an app, we also see the potential for Pantrio to expand into a startup, where jobs past design and coding also become relevant.
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