Eco Friendly Food Alternative App - Honorable Mention

Nova Hacks is proud to announce a feature article on Eco Friendly Food Alternative App for the Nova Hacks I hack.

This project was inspired by a dataset showing the environmental impact of common foods. Realizing the need for greater awareness about CO₂ emissions from food choices, the creator developed an app to suggest eco-friendly meal alternatives without compromising protein or fats. Users can compare popular global dishes and find lower-emission options based on recent data from CO₂ food surveys.

Building an Eco-Friendly Platform

The app’s backend, built with Flask, manages data efficiently while Next.js powers the interactive frontend. The developer tackled pagination across different languages for seamless results display. Debugging issues like excessive data on high-CO₂ items (like beef) led to implementing lazy loading, improving performance. Hosted on Vercel and Render, this platform is ready to help users make eco-friendly dining choices.

While creating this project, I ran into various challenges which includes creating pagination for backends in different language, while easy if both are in javascript it takes a significant amount of time to do the same thing if the backend is in different language than the frontend.

Future plans include integrating advanced machine learning to expand the dataset and refine recommendations, aiming to become the go-to for sustainable meal planning.

Check out their work here:

https://devpost.com/software/eco-friendly-recipe-app-gk1aqt

Test it out here! https://github.com/gitstar-oc/hackathon

If you liked this article and enjoyed Eco Friendly Food Alternative App, feel free to leave a comment of support on their Devpost page.