We were inspired by the massive food waste problem that happens in many people's day to day lives. The food wasted will eventually go to the landfill which is very damaging to our environment as it releases very toxic gases and other harmful chemicals to our atmosphere. Through this hackathon, we thought it would be a great idea to contribute in solving this problem.

The Zero-Waste Recipe App can keep track of the food you buy and their individual expiry dates. When food nears its expiry date, our app notices it and highlights it for you. From there, the app can be told to search for recipes containing those ingredients online using a recipe API, which will help you use those ingredients before they expire and have to be thrown out. The ingredients that typically expire before being used are often uncommon food items or perishables, so our app is a useful tool to remind you of what’s in your pantry and what you can cook with it.

In the future, we plan to make this website mobile friendly and create a mobile app alternative to allow better accessibility and convenience for the users. We would also like to implement a notification feature to notify the user of food that is about to expire so that it does not go to waste. For mobile platforms, a feature we want to include is the ability to take pictures of receipts and food items using the phone’s camera. Our app would then parse data like the type of food and expiry date from the picture using image and text recognition software, which would make the process of adding food to the list more convenient.