Inspiration
While most food-related apps are somewhat expensive and aren't worth it for people of lower incomes, we wanted to make something accessible to anyone, regardless of financial situation. Learn2Cook was our solution, focusing on the food people make at home rather than by delivery or online.
What it does
Learn2Cook is an app that helps you regularly find new recipes within your budget. It has a collection of hundreds of recipes to fit all dietary needs and restrictions. Users choose a budget, and the app responds with three recipes that won't go over it.
How we built it
We got our information from Spoonacular API, which provided us with recipes, ingredients, prices, etc. Using Flask and Jinja we made a web-app allowing the user to input their budget and dietary restrictions. Pandas was the library we used to handle all of our data.
Challenges we ran into
The API was confusing to use, so parsing through it for useful information was a challenge. We also weren't immune to the integration challenges typical of connecting a frontend and backend. Switching between JS and Python was a minor inconvenience that our sleep deprivation made much less minor :) While dealing with the technical challenges, we went through some external issues as well (switching locations several times, severely limited wifi).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The Pandas library was very new to us, so we're proud to have pulled off what we did in the time we had. Writing algorithms with "negative two hours of sleep" was also an accomplishment.
What we learned
A lot of data management and the Pandas library. We also attended many presentations and workshops and met plenty of people.
What's next for Learn2Cook
Adding a social component, having something like "recipe of the week" for all users to share. Cleaning up the looks of the site, connecting to grocers to calculate prices based on users' area. Adding ad revenue would be needed to make it profitable.
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