Cheaply Delicious

Links

GitHub Repo: Cheaply Delicious

Devpost Accounts: Joshua Obljubek-Thomas, Yuejia (Jessie) Yin, Tiger Jin, and Samuel Ke

Inspiration   

The inspiration behind Cheaply Delicious stems from our interest in creating a social or community impact. Whether it's helping others to expand their food options within a budget or by offering more sustainable and accessible options, Cheaply Delicious gives people the opportunity to enjoy their favourite foods without financial stress, strengthening communities through savings, support, and delicious foods.   

We aim for Cheaply Delicious to serve as a reliable and friendly platform to help users find the cheapest stores based on their location to buy ingredients for their favourite foods.

What it Does   

1. The landing page directs users to the "search" page.

2. Users paste a link to a recipe in addition to inputting their postal code for location services.

3. Once uploaded, ingredients, their quantity, and units of the recipe are scraped through HTML format. 

4. Users are also given stores based on their current location to buy the cheapest ingredients.

5. A total cost of groceries and details about the recipe are also provided for user knowledge.

6. Users may also wish to create an account for future features.

How We Built It   

Front-End:

• Tailwind CSS
• HTML
• JavaScript

Back-End:

• Spring Boot
• Maven
• Java
• Apache OpenNLP

Challenges We Ran Into   

Throughout the envisionment and development of Cheaply Delicious, several key challenges revolved around the implementation of APIs such as SpringBoot and Vaadin. In other words:

1. Establishing the service layer + POST request facilitating.

2. Processing between user submissions.

3. Web scraping.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of   

Planned a implementation of frontend and backend programming languages in order to benefit consumers, making it more convenient to use and innovate with recipes.

Challenged ourselves in both frontend and full-stack programming through our novel foray into these techniques, surprising ourselves with both our abilities and accomplishments.

Achieved working implementations of our goals with plans to further these accomplishments to fulfill the potential of this project.

Gained valuable knowledge in creating a full end-to-end web-application that we can now use for future opportunities and hackathons.

What We Learned   

Implementation of Tailwind CSS, JavaScript, and HTML for our frontend portion as well as Spring Boot, Maven, and Apache OpenNLP for our backend. In addition, the time constraints of a hackathon taught us to become more accustomed to decisive action, leadership (when it was called for), and collaboration & communication of the highest order.

What's Next?   

The future of Cheaply Delicious aims to provide users with more flexibility, personal benefits, engagement, and more with the platform:

Flexibility: Various route options such as gas efficient, minimum distance, toll-free, and more.

Full Implementation: Have all the features we originally envisioned fully implemented in order to properly fulfill our goals.

Personal Health: Aside from budgeting, providing nutritional information will give users the opportunity to find a balance between finance and nutrition! 

Engagement: Expand API integrations with additional supermarket chains to increase choices and diversity for users.

Quality of Life: Consulting and revising the application based on small-sample customer reviews in order to optimize the product better for consumers.