The internet has made our lives so much simpler. Everything we would ever want or need is right at our fingertips. For preparing food, recipes are present in abundance on the web. Gone are the days when we would have to manually search for recipes on physical recipe cookbooks. However, there still exists a drawback common to both - they both require a certain set of ingredients that the user must have with them. This becomes a deal-breaker for users who want to prepare food from leftovers or a limited set of ingredients whilst also catering to their tastes.
Our project aims to overcome the above limitations by proposing the use of a multi- functional progressive web app, which provides recipes to the user based on the names of ingredients they already have and other filters such as nutritional content, food allergies, etc. It also provides an alternative search by image recognition based on ingredients and recipe name. Besides this, it packs a variety of other features such as meal planning, a shopping list, and a special segment dedicated to traditional Indian home remedies. It even offers facilities such as user recipe contribution and social media integration, all in one app!
The reason our proposed app stands apart from the other existing solutions is that it includes a vast variety of Indian recipes and traditional homemade remedies. During our case studies of prevailing applications offering similar functionalities, it was noticed that Indian cuisine recipes were under-represented and therefore we decided to make an app that was more tailored to the needs of the Indian user base. Our app also has a unique feature known as Dadi Ke Nuske, which comprises the best hand-picked home remedies that have been passed down from generation to generation and offer simple methods to relieve common ailments.
According to the Acosta Report, released in August 2020, with the onset of the pandemic, 55% of customers said that they are eating at home more often, and anticipate that they will go out to dine less or not at all. 43% of respondents said that they wish they could spend less time on the cooking process with 40% saying meal planning is a major hassle to the process. Be it due to financial/movement constraints, or any other reason, empowering foreign students, hostelites and working-from-home parents to be able to find the best cooking solution and be able to choose the right recipe matching the available ingredients, is a major problem we are trying to address.
So, we are trying to overcome the limitations of the existing solutions and deliver a better user experience while solving the acute problem. We even realized the lack of a food community, and hence aim to implement social media sharing of recipes and user addition of recipes to create an ever-increasing content driven user food community. Even contacting some local experts and potential users of the application allowed us to identify unique features such as Meal Planner, Favourites, Surprise Recipe, Ingredient Recognition and a Shopping list that would allow us to solve real world problems and create a truly distinguishing user experience.
The app is built using MERN (Mongo-Express-React-Node) Stack. This project was bootstrapped with [Create React App] (https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app). Documentation for making a Progressive Web App.
You can run the hosted version here
- Fork the repository and clone to your local system
- Connecting to Database - Import the
funddb.sqlinto your MySQL server. npm install- Installs all the dependencies into your folder.npm start- Runs the app in the development mode. Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser. The page will reload if you make edits. You will also see any lint errors in the console.- In a separate terminal, type
node backend/server.jsto get the server running.
APP developed by Vritika Naik, Rushabh Wadkar, Joyrel Vaz and Apurva Virgincar, as their Final Year Project at Goa College of Engineering.