With the increasing food prices across western Canada many people, particularly university students, are unable to afford to their daily groceries. At times they have sort to resorts of dumpster divings where they collect leftovers from groceries stores to feed their empty stomachs. On contrary, approximately 30 percent of produce in Canada is rejected by distributors for being too ugly which leads to waste of food and resources. Our idea utilized to utilize this waste food into an opportunity to connect both communities thus creating a sustainable environment. Through our application "ugly produces" are met with hungry stomachs and happy families.
Ugly Produce is an online marketplace where various grocery providers can sell their ugly produce at discounted prices. User can casually browse based on their location and connect with sellers this platform. If someone wishes to sell their produce, they can create an account or login to create an ugly produce posting. We added additional AI functionality where user can pass in any produce name, like potato, and our interface is going to suggest recipes using Potato :-) Yes, student are always looking for easy recipes!
Our tech stack of following: Backend: Django Frontend: ReactJS Tools and Frameworks: PostgreSQL, Materials UI, Bootstrap 5, OpenAI
We had challenges coming up with the idea and how to branch it out to make it more interesting and an engaging community for people. Also, setting and testing API routes created additional challenges.
Learning the stack and developing a working model given some of us had no prior experience in stack and dealing with APIs.
Some team members were working with ReactJS for the first time. Working with CRUD operations and integration of Django made the project. integration of OpenAI functionalities were a good learning curve for us.
Ugliest produce of the week contest. Better infrastructure for handling larger produce information loads. Communication between producers and customers.
Submission for nwHacks2024 Hackathon at UBC Vancouver.
