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EatIt

A grocery tracking app to reduce waste

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Eatit is a grocery tracking app that helps you eat what you buy and buy what you eat.

In the U.S, around 40 percent of all edible food is
wasted. Consumers cause a significant portion of
that waste. The average American throws away 20
pounds of food in the trash every month. Much of it
is perfectly good, unused, fresh produce, meat and
dairy that is simply not being used in time. Eatit
aims to reduce this waste by helping you eat what
you buy and buy what you ea

Eatit tracks the groceries you have in your kitchen
and nudges you to use them while they are still
fresh.

It uses the language of color and size to show
everything you have in your kitchen; color
represents how soon you should use an ingredient
and size indicates the quantity of each ingredient.

Eatit also collects recipes from your favorite food
websites based on what you have in the kitchen and
what needs to be used soon. Over time, Eatit helps
you to learn your food behaviors so that wasting
less food becomes an effortless habit.

 

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The only thing that you need to do to start using Eatit is “Add” the groceries you purchase. To do this, simply
scan the receipt or type to enter the food and its quantity. In the case of receipt scanning, Eatit uses OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) technology to match the items in the receipt to its database (fig. A). This is the
first step to separate perishable food items from the receipt. It then assigns shelf-life and storage tip to each
item. Eatit uses existing resources like the FoodKeeper database to get this information into its system.

Once Eatit has the information about the food, the quantity, and its shelf-life it uses its advanced algorithms to
calculate the number of servings for each ingredient (fig. B). It takes into consideration the total quantity of an
item and divides it by the average quantity consumed by a person in one meal. (This data is collected and fed
into its database. It also looks into the consumption pattern for each item across the Eatit community and uses it
to calculate the number of servings). On confirming, Eatit creates a simple visualization of everything you
added to the “My Kitchen” section of the app (fig.C).

Based on the ingredients you have, it also looks for recipes from your favorite food blog and websites which it
learns during the onboarding process. Every time you make a recipe from the app and slide on “I made it”
button (fig. D), the app automatically updates the ingredient quantity based on the number of serving used for
the particular recipe. You can also double tap on an ingredient in “My Kitchen” section to manually update the
quantity.

My Activity section shows information about the servings of food you used vs. wasted for each week (fig. E).
This way it tracks your usage pattern and every once in awhile celebrates your success or helps you with ways to
do better. It also makes a list of ingredients that you used up or ones you couldn’t, so that next time when you
go grocery shopping you can make better choices of what to buy and how much – and waste less.

 

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