AI powered recommendations to reduce food waste at home

03/07/2019

Sommersemester 2019 - Grocery Check - Student Start-up Project

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Ineffiecient Grocery Management

Working 40 hours or more per week, having kids, doing the grocery shopping and on top of that doing the cooking everyday add up to a lot of tasks and daily stress for every parent. Therefore, there is no time left to use up the bought groceries and provide the family with home-made meals. Most ready-meals contain ingredients that are neither nutritious nor beneficial for the health of the family, but what continuously adds up, since the groceries that had been purchased in the past have expired, is that they are simply thrown in the trash. This cycle of not using up the bought groceries, because there is no time to either think about what to cook or search for fitting recipes, continues daily and just adds up to the massive piles of food waste that are annually produced worldwide. In the DACH region alone, households produce about 8,4 tons of food waste annually. As statistics have shown, the two main reasons for the massive contribution of food waste to environmental pollution are households that, on the one hand, are purchasing way more groceries than needed and, on the other hand, are cooking in enormous portions.

The Ideal Family Grocery Manager

This vicious cycle of unused groceries ending up in the trash can be broken by the app “GroceryCheck”. As the founders of GroceryCheck, it is our mission to simplify the lives of families in terms of managing their groceries and preparing meals for themselves. Our vision is to provide families all over the world with recipes that include already owned food items, in order to encourage them to cook more home-made meals and to reduce food waste worldwide.

One picture towards a greener future

With the app, families are able to log all of their purchased food items into a virtual inventory by simply taking a picture of the supermarket receipt. The purpose of the inventory is to support families in keeping track of what products they have already bought and, based on standard information about expiration dates, they will be reminded about certain food items that are about to expire and should therefore be consumed in the near future. With the recipe suggestions that are adapted to the existing food items in a household, families are encouraged to consume these items in time, which leads to more home-made meals and less discarded food.

To sum up, the app GroceryCheck assists families with their overall grocery management, which on the one hand implies their time management and on the other their financial management, since saved food leads to saved money.

Student team

  • Emilia Grasl (WU)

  • Liv Hameder (WU)

  • Marko Marisavljevic (TU)

  • Max Matschiner (TU)

  • Alexander Novak (WU)

Project-Manager

  • Mag. Michael Filzmoser (TU)

  • Richard Olbrecht, M.Sc. (WU)

  • Alexander Staub, M.Sc. (WU)

  • Univ. Ass. IM Ing. Dipl.-Ing. Dragos-Cristian Vasilescu, BSc (TU)