ThriftEats

ThriftEats is the one-stop solution for grocery budgeting. Browse through hundreds of weekly deals, find recipes, and plan your meals ahead-- all in one place! Save your wallet and the planet

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Inspiration

The idea for ThriftEats came from a messy stack of weekly ads on the kitchen table. As college students, the value of both time and money is incalculable— so why choose between wasting time parsing through dozens of deals every week, or wasting money due to being unaware of said deals? ThriftEats aims to streamline the budgeting, shopping, and planning process of buying groceries. Our goal is to maximize savings while minimizing stress.

What it Does

The ThriftEats site first asks users to input their location, preferred stores, and dietary preferences. Based on these preferences, it searches the web for hundreds of weekly deals at grocery stores for you to browse through. When you select a particular deal, it then suggests recipes based on that item (and other items on sale) so that you can buy exactly what you need, helping both your wallet and the planet !

How We Built It

As a team, we were all passionate about sustainability and community and we knew we had to build something that combines the two and hence ThriftEats came about. We began by building the prototype of the app in Figma. We then split the work and began simultaneously coding the backend, in Javascript, and the frontend, in React. We than integrated the backend and frontend and worked on enhancing our UI features.

Challenges We Ran Into

One of our biggest roadblocks was the lack of an existing API of grocery coupons and deals. Our temporary stand-in solution was the coupon.json file, which contains around 70 manually-entered entries of current deals at stores in the 98195 area. Another issue we faced was using the Spoonacular API for the recipes which none of us had much experience with. The API is well written but it was a lot of documentation to go through. We were also using a free version of the API which limited us to only 150 requests a day but because of an initial bug in our code, we ended up exceeding that limit and so we had to generate a new API key multiple times.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

It was really cool to slowly build functionality for the site from the ground up using React and Javascript. None of us had much prior experience with APIs so we're glad that we could build something using it that actually works ! Additionally, the dedication and teamwork throughout these 28 hours was a shining point in this experience.

What We Learned

We gained a lot of knowledge on working with APIs. We were also able to improve our backend and frontend skills. We realized that while we were good at coding the backend or fronted separately, we had a lot of learning to do on how to integrate them.

What's Next for ThriftEats

Some additional functionalities to be added:

  1. Allowing user to input ingredients that they already have on hand.
  2. Figuring out a sustainable long-term solution for scraping deals and discounts from the web.
  3. Allowing for more filters in addition to vegetarian and gluten free, e.g. dairy-free, vegan, kosher, halal, etc.
  4. Figuring out the best method to host our site on the cloud.

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