Food Matters

Why

Food waste is a problem we can all relate to. To tackle this on a personal level, we needed to do research first and take a look on a global scale.

We came to the conclusion that food waste is a much bigger problem to begin with. To name a few:

• Economic: Yearly loss of between 780 billion – 1 trillion dollar.

• Climate: If food loss and waste were a country, it’d be the 3th largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the US.

• Natural resources: Loss of water, oil and land.

• Biodiversity: Land conversion to agriculture is one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity

The perfect example to identify our problem with was given to us by Lander (but we can all relate): You lookup a recipe, it tells you 20+ different ingredients, you go to the shop, buy everything and cook it. That’s when you end up using 1 tablespoon of maple sirup. That bottle of maple sirup is still in your fridge and you have no idea what to do with it. Everyone has this problem on different levels but we hate throwing away food.

We believe that every piece of food in your kitchen has some serious potential.

That’s why we came up with FoodMatters!

Key features

FOODMatters generates a meal plan for a specific period of time with bulk-bought ingredients that will be completely used.

• Efficient meal planning with ingredient memory.

• Personalized meal suggestions for specific amount of days.

• Grocery shopping listbased on your selection.

• Easy step-by-step recipeswith smart kitchen timer .

What

• Frederic (Design) wrote out the concept flow followed by low fidelity wireframes (Paper). Decided the scope of the project together with the team. Made 3-4 visual concepts in sketch ( High fidelity) chose one and turned this into a clickable prototype

• Roberto (Mobile) checked out some possible data that could be used for future implementations and integrated the kickass AI/ML backend that Lander provided together with the fancy designs of Fred into a working iOS prototype.

• Lander (Backend) looked at the different APIs that were provided and wrote an algorithm to match ingredients between recipes. He also provided all the data that was needed to be displayed in the app.

• Ancy (Business) made sure we had a professionally structures powerpoint presentation. She took over the business side of the project.

Challenges

• Defining the scope of the project. We had so many good ideas that it was a bit hard to focus.

• Matching recipes with meaningful others. We needed to exclude salt, pepper and others

• We only had a limited amount of recipes to work with

Status

• Backend of the working algorithm matching the recipes is up and running.

• We have a working iOS prototype you can play around in.

Future

• Additional dietary preferences(e.g. vegan, vegetarian, low-carb) and allergies.

• Refrigerator feature to manually add food for recipe suggestions

• Integration with home delivery services (e.g. Coop@home)

Who

Lander Van Breda (lvbreda@gmail.com)

Roberto Dries (robertodries92@gmail.com)

Ancy Mechelmans (ancymechelmans@gmail.com)

Frederic Berghmans (fre.berghmans@gmail.com)

DESIGNS / SLIDES (PPTX)