The growing trend towards veganism has incited a need for an easy method to ensure that consumer products ranging from food, to makeup, to medicine, do not contain any non-vegan ingredients. Many of these ingredients are highly inconspicuous--isinglass, lactic acid, anyone?--let alone difficult to commit to memory.
A mobile app that scans the product ingredients list for non-vegan ingredients and alerts the user of whether the product is vegan.
We built the iOS app utilizing Flutter after designing the UI in Figma. For the back-end, we extracted text from images using Google Cloud Optical Character Recognition and ran the text through a web scraper we developed using BeautifulSoup, thereby comparing the product's ingredients with a dynamic database of non-vegan ingredients.
No one on our team had experience with mobile app development, so learning how to use Flutter was a huge obstacle. Another major challenge was integrating all the different platforms we used, especially connecting the ML output to the web scraping algorithm on Flutter.
We created a functional app! We are also very proud of the fact that we were able to maintain motivation and work through the hackathon without the incentive of free pizza.
...is that one of our members is vegan! We also learned about many new frameworks, including Google Firebase, Flutter, and BeautifulSoup.
This application could be translated to other diets like kosher and halal diets, as well as specific ingredients to watch out for, such as in allergies.