Expire-E Tray

Screenshot of expiry warning appearing
Diagram of API structure
Project Logo

Inspiration

While in the researching phase, we discovered a staggering statistic: 38% of all food in the United States is wasted. This is an absolutely unacceptable statistic. After researching further on the issue and brainstorming on how we can implement technology to help, we landed on another statistic: about 20% of all food waste is because of expiration. Our Expire-E Tray software tackles this issue by creating an expiration alert system for the user’s food items.

How it works

The user can input text or images (using LogMeal API). After the LogMeal API finds out what food it is, users may receive pop-ups with our custom autocorrect confirming the selected item. Next, the user is asked where they stored the food, and would give information if the food should be placed elsewhere. Finally, a background notification program is run that will remind you when food is within 20 days of expiry. We also implemented a nutrition assessment of images of food to measure a healthy variability of proteins, sugars, sodium, carbohydrates, and fats. The nutrition assessment gives custom output letting the user know what to fix in the meal in the future. This was all done by diving deeper into the LogMeal API Next we would like to improve the infrastructure to allow for more features such as data visualization so you can remember what is and isn't in your fridge.

Challenges

One of our biggest challenges was time management. With such a big project with so many connecting pieces, we were coding a lot to try to connect the pieces and make a cohesive whole. Implementing the GUI was also a challenge, as it involves creating a full graphical interface for our python classes and functions.