Wakefern EZShop

Revamp your college life with our app: smart grocery lists with instant price totals, find nearest stores, and uncover recipes in a snap. Save time, money, and enjoy more.

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Tell us about your technology experience this weekend. Give us some feedback about any of the technology you interacted with at this hackathon. Make sure you mention what tech you're reviewing (e.g. Auth0, GitHub, Cloudflare, etc.)

Inspiration

As college students, we often lack time to spend on shopping, due to schoolwork and other life activities. Therefore, we wanted to find a way to streamline the shopping experience, both saving time and money for students, making it less stressful in the end.

What it does

This is an IOS app that finds the nearest Wakefern store near you, and allows you to make lists of items to buy at the store. We also implemented a recipe builder within the app that allows you to break down the items within common recipes such as cakes, spaghetti, and much much more. This makes it easier to compile shopping lists at your fingertips.

How we built it

Our app is create with Swift, which allowed us to design a seamless and responsive interface for the front-end, ensuring that students can navigate with ease and efficiency. For the back-end, Swift's speed and performance capabilities enable us to handle data management, providing real-time updates for grocery pricing, store locations, and recipe suggestions through the use of different API’s.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into was a lack of information from the Wakefern API. The API did not have as detailed information as we required, such as the differences in item prices based on store location. We were also limited by the APIs we were using, as they would often time out due to the amount of data we were trying to process through them (specifically 400 requests for the different Wakefern stores). Furthermore, the location API on Xcode had request limits, in other words, we could not calculate distances to 300 stores, only around 30-40.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the recipe lookup and the store distance lookup, as that was the most technically hard part of the project. It required specific uses of APIs and problem-solving when they did not fulfill all of our requirements.

What we learned

We learned about how app development is really carried through from scratch. It was a new thing for most of us, and most of us had not really coded in Swift before. We learned how to use Xcode and Swift, as well as unique API interaction.

What's next for Wakefern EZShop

We plan to implement more functions that allow users to see two different price lists that compare the total list price with and without a loyalty membership, along with any coupons available. We also want to create lists with the actual items in the stores that are generated from the recipe builder.

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