ioanacm / plantry

Plantry

Inspiration

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, around 40% of food goods are wasted annually in the U.S. Food waste produces significant amounts of CO2 when decomposing, because of its improper disposal. Individual food waste could be cut down simply by planning your weekly meals and buying accordingly.

What it does

Plantry is an intelligent shopping list that keeps you informed about your carbon footprint. Plantry helps you plan environmentally friendly shopping lists by recommending recipes based on ingredients that you already own. Why buy something you don't need?

How we built it

We used NodeJS for the front-end and the back-end. Data is stored using MongoDB and the web app is deployed on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

JavaScript can be a terrible language to debug. Tracing our mistakes was time-consuming but we overcame this by pair programming. Linking the database with the web app was also difficult but that was due, again, to JavaScript-specific issues. Bottom line? maybe switch to TypeScript :)))

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app has extended functionalities and isn't only a hacky piece of spaghetti code. The design and animations are beautiful! We started with a real issue that we run into a lot as students: food waste; and ended with an overall great solution. If we find this useful as individuals, we're sure this could be useful to others as well!

What we learned

How to better structure a project.

What's next for Plantry

Improving the recipe library.

Built With

• heroku
• javascript
• mongodb
• node.js

Try it out

PlantryAtlas.herokuapp.com