XpiryTrackr

Inspiration

We were thinking about how to reduce food waste, and one of us pointed out that a lot of food waste comes from expired food. We wanted to fix that.

Interestingly, during research, we found that expiring food caused problems in two ways, instead of just the obvious one where people forgot about their food until it expired. Food labels and expiry dates on food aren't actually a real indicator of actual product safety, and confusion over labelling leads to people throwing out 'expired' food that's actually still good.

What it does

The program scans your product's bar code, identifies what that product is and then scans the expiry date. It uses that information to keep track of when something you own is about to expire and reminds you if it is. The calendar view makes it easier to get an overall view of all your expiring products, which is easier to interpret visually than just a list. It also reminds you that a product might still be safe to eat even after the best before date.

The flow for adding an item is streamlined in a way to minimize tapping, which would normally make scanning a 20 item grocery run sound cumbersome. The barcode scanner automatically cycles through the user flow, with manual buttons allowing for cases where things can't be scanned properly.

How we built it

We installed React on our computer and used Visual Studio Code to program our app. Prototyping and wireframing were done on Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We had 24 hours to learn a new language React Native.

Accomplishments

We successfully designed and programmed an app using a language we had minimal experience in just 24 hours. We managed to accomplish this even though we were in different time zones.