Hungershare

Share your homemade recipes to the world!

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Inspiration

There are two major problems faced by an Indian user who wants to share or view recipes on the internet -

  • Firstly, with the growing age of digitisation, there is an ocean of recipes on the internet but very few of them have innovative dessert recipes which are homemade. These modern dessert recipes require cooking expertise and often have no health and nutritive value.
  • Secondly, Indian people like to share their homemade recipes in their regional languages and extensively use regional ingredient names.

Our platform solves these two problems at its core while giving the best experience and a dedicated platform to all foodies to showcase their recipes.

What it does

In its essence, it is a homemade dessert recipe sharing community where people get to share their recipes or get inspired by others.

The platform leverages both written form and video form of a particular recipe to easily follow along, while also giving a clear list of ingredients with correct metrics.

Not only this, but the platform also displays an intelligent nutritional chart, which extracts ingredients and their quantities from recipes and calculates their nutritional value, which is specifically useful for health-conscious people.

An advanced search mechanism allows to search and filter recipes based on specific ingredients of choice.

To top it all, ingredient names can be given as what they are called in English or 8 different regional Indian languages.

How we built it

We built technology from scratch may it be firebase user authentication and login or the smart nutritional value generator.

Our platform is built in two parts - frontend and backend. The frontend is built with NextJS, a ReactJS framework, along with several Javascript libraries while the backend is built with Nodejs and Express. The frontend is deployed on Vercel while the backend is deployed on DigitalOcean using Docker. We use MongoDB as our database and Algolia to offer recipe search.

We made a nutritional value database of various food categories in different to calculate and generate the nutritional value of various recipes.

All the computation and logic are handled by our backend and the frontend is responsible to render the business logic. The flow of data between both is done using REST APIs.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge was building our in-house nutritional value generator which not only took quite a lot of time to collect nutritional information about different foods and store it in our database but also calculate and display it in a form that is understandable by the end-user.

Also, minor implementation challenges were posed by implementing recipe search using Algolia and Firebase user authentication using phone number OTP.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The most specific accomplishment to be proud of is the nutritional value generator which we implemented from scratch along with the overall UX of the platform.

Implementing an in-house nutritional value generator not only took a lot of toll in collecting reliable data of various food items but also posed a problem of taking a lot of time in querying such a large database. But we were able to pull off things quite good and now it generates nutritional info in a few seconds.

What we learned

Major learning while building such a product is the value of the low-level design of each feature. Also learned how to write production-grade code which is scalable in the long run.

What's next for Hungershare

This is just the start. I want to build hungershare into a full-fledged powerhouse that boasts of using innovative technologies to build products around food and recipe sharing. Few pointers -

  • Recipe recommender system leveraging artificial intelligence.
  • Automatic recipe video generator using images of each step of cooking submitted by the user.
  • Community chatrooms for discussing everything related to food.
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