PROJECT BENTO
feb 2020
THE INCENTIVE
Project Bento was developed during a weekend at a Boston hackathon. In attempts to fit our project into the theme of sustainability, our team decided to make work within our own kitchens. Within our team, we noticed a common theme of overstocking our fridges just to throw out mold every two weeks.
Our idea was to reverse the recipe-searching engine––instead of searching by cuisines and food-names, why not search by the ingredient?
Bento would be the solution to proactively keep track of the things in our fridge all while having the freedom to explore new recipes!
WHAT IT DOES
Bento allows you to search through a database of recipes... the catch is, you search by the ingredients available to you, instead of the name of the recipe. This functionality allows for more exploration in the kitchen and less food waste. Instead of looking up a recipe to buy the necessary ingredients (which always results in leftovers btw), Bento challenges that tradition by forcing you to find recipes by the ingredients you already have in your home. Clean up your fridge and enjoy a delicious meal in one!
BRANDING
Our team decided upon the name "Bento" as some of our members recalled their parents using our incentified resourceful mentality when packing our school bento boxes.
Bento boxes are traditionally used to describe a Japanese packed lunch, consisting of such items as rice, vegetables, and sashimi... or anything at hand.
Living in a Korean household, I too had a similar experience every school lunch as I unpacked yesterday's dinner resurrected in new form. We called it "do-shi-rak."
THE DESIGN
As the lead designer, I decided to honor the Japanese background of our branding initiative, and chose a bright Red as our defining brand color.
The "t" in the logotype duplicated creates our logo -- which depicts a very simplified bento box shape.
Because of the limited amount of time that we had to design, wireframe, and build the app, we decided to keep it as simple as possible. We refrained from adding too much additional clutter and only kept what we felt was absolutely essential to the function and usability, as we figured the recipe images would also take up a lot of the eye-space.
HOW WE BUILT IT
We first tried to find a place to gather our data, ultimately deciding to take from AllRecipes with Python. For about 10-15 hours, we web-scraped AllRecipes with BeautifulSoup, collecting around 30,000 recipes total for our web app. We stored all of our information in a JSON file, and built our framework so that we could directly access each section of any recipe that we needed. We utilized React JS, HTML, and CSS for the front end development and design
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
We are extremely proud that in the short amount of time that we had, we were able to build an aesthetically pleasing, functional website (a minimal viable product to say the least). In the complications that we ran into, we found ways to "hack" them, and we continued strong throughout our entire process. We are also very proud of our teamwork. Since the beginning, we were able to effectively brainstorm and divvy up the work so that all of us were working on something.
As first time hackers (hackathon-wise), we did not know what to expect from the event nor from the product. We can conclusively say that we were forced to learn a lot about web development during the creation of our product, especially from how the final product was pieced together.
WHAT'S NEXT FOR BENTO?
We believe that there is a lot of hope for Bento in the near future. We have so many ideas on how we could improve our current product by refining the search qualities, adding more information into our dataset, making the user experience speedier and more seamless. Aside from that, we also see Bento growing and becoming accustomed with future technologies. The first thing that comes to mind: we are thinking of optimizations so that Bento could potentially track the hierarchy of importance amongst ingredients in the user's fridge-the closeness to expiration being the determinant of importance.