Description as a Tweet:

With UPlan, I no longer have to choose between breaking my diet and eating at UMass Dining. I've got no excuses!

Inspiration:

We were inspired to make UPlan after having problems searching for food at UMass that met all our dietary restrictions and had good nutritional value. We thought, instead of going on a hunt for foods we can eat every time we go to UMass, we should be able to create a meal plan beforehand.

What it does:

Our web application is here to help with any and all dietary restrictions or allergies that make it challenging to plan meals that fit your needs. With our app, you can customize your meal plan based on your dietary restrictions and preferences, and rank it based on custom attributes.

Whether you're vegan, gluten-free, paleo, or have other dietary needs, our app has got you covered. Simply input your dietary restrictions and preferences, and our app will suggest meals available in the UMass Dining Halls that meet your needs.

With our custom attribute feature, you can rank different dishes based on a specific attribute that's important to you, such as healthiness, sustainability, or carbon footprint.

Our web app is user-friendly, customizable, and perfect for anyone looking to simplify their meal planning and eat healthier.

Whether you are an environmentalist wanting to reduce your carbon footprint on the planet or someone with a severe allergy, our app has you covered! Give it a try today and start enjoying delicious meals that meet your needs!"

The homepage of the web app would welcome the user and provide them with the option to sign up or log in. Once they have logged in, they will be taken to a dashboard where they can set up their dietary preferences, including any allergies or intolerances they may have, as well as their preferred cuisine types and meal types.

The user can input their dietary restrictions into the web app, which could include common allergens like gluten, dairy, and nuts, as well as dietary preferences such as vegan, vegetarian, paleo, and keto. They can also specify their preferred cuisine types such as Asian, Italian, Mexican, etc.

After setting up their dietary preferences, the user can then access the meal planner feature, where they can generate a meal plan for the week or month based on their restrictions and preferences. The meal planner feature can suggest recipes that meet the user's dietary restrictions and preferences, including ingredients and nutritional information.

How we built it:

We separated our team to research and work on the three main components of the project: our React front end, our Firebase database, and our Python web scraping script. Later on, we linked these applications together so that our React app could submit queries to Firebase and so that our Python script could post data to Firebase.

Technologies we used:

• HTML/CSS
• Javascript
• Node.js
• React
• Python

Challenges we ran into:

We generally faced the challenge of having limited experience in React and Firebase, and therefore we made limited progress with our UI and spent the majority of our time figuring out how to parse information from our web scraper to Firebase and from Firebase to our React components. We also had problems figuring out how to not duplicate our scraped items and properly sort the items based on which elements they appeared in.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We are proud of being able to utilize Python's Beautiful Soup to get our data and have it displayed in React as that was the most difficult part of our project.

What we've learned:

We learned a lot about web development in general as well as how to manage a database with Firebase. We also learned about using Beautiful Soup to sort through HTML data.

What's next:

We would like to work on the UI a lot in the future so that users get well-categorized food options and add a component that keeps track of how much of each nutritional item (fat, sodium, calories, etc.) is in their meal plan as they add items to it.

Built with:

We built our project using React for the front end and Firebase for the back end. We also built a separate application for scraping data off of the UMass Dining menu which we plan on running once a day to update our meal plans.

Prizes we're going for:

• Best Pitch/Demo
• Best Sustainability Hack
• Best Software Hack
• Best Hack for a Healthier Happier World
• Best User Experience / Product Design Hack
• Best Use of Data Hack!

Anavi Dharawat
Donald Winkelman
Amanda Zhu

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