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.
The ThriftEats site first asks users to input their location, preferred stores, and dietary preferences. Then it searches the web, constantly updating the newest deals and discounts at local stores. Using these low prices, it concatenates ingredients on sale with ingredients the user already has on hand to generate possible recipes.
yall gotta help with this part bc i Don't Know lol
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 a few manually-entered entries of current deals at stores in the 98195 area. Another issue we faced was (lorem ipsum what we're struggling with code-wise)
It was really cool to slowly build functionality for the site from the ground up using React. We also learned how to host our site on the cloud through this project. Additionally, the dedication and teamwork throughout these 28 hours was a shining point in this experience.
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Some additional functionalities to be added:
- Allowing user to input ingredients that they already have on hand.
- Figuring out a sustainable long-term solution for scraping deals and discounts from the web.
- Allowing for more filters in addition to vegetarian and gluten free, e.g. dairy-free, vegan, kosher, halal, etc.