Food Expiry Tracker is a smart web application that helps users manage food inventory by scanning product barcodes and extracting expiry dates using OCR (Tesseract.js). Built with Next.js and styled u
Food wastage is a pressing global issue, often caused by poor inventory management and untracked expiry dates. Our Food Expiry Tracker is a modern solution designed to tackle this problem efficiently by empowering users to manage their food inventory with ease and accuracy.
This application allows users to scan product barcodes and automatically extract expiry dates using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). With a seamless UI built using modern tools, users can quickly add items to their inventory and receive timely alerts before the products expire – minimizing waste and maximizing usage.
Whether you're a home user managing your kitchen or a small business tracking stock, this tool simplifies expiry management in a smart and scalable way.
During the hackathon, we followed a structured yet agile approach to build our Food Expiry Tracker: Ideation & Problem Discovery We identified food wastage due to forgotten expiry dates as a real-world problem and validated the need for a simple tracking system. Tech Stack Finalization We selected Next.js for scalability, Tesseract.js for OCR-based expiry detection, and v0.dev for rapid UI generation using React + Tailwind CSS + Shadcn/UI. Feature Planning & Design We divided the app into key features: Barcode scanning OCR-based expiry detection Manual product input Inventory listing & expiry alerts Rapid Development Used v0.dev to quickly build clean, reusable components. Integrated Tesseract.js for extracting expiry text from scanned images. Hooked in barcode scanning using a JavaScript-based scanner. Managed state via React Hooks and handled routing via Next.js. Testing & Iteration We tested with multiple real-world product labels to improve OCR accuracy and optimized the UI/UX for speed and simplicity. Deployment & Demo Prep Final version was deployed and demo-ready with functional expiry tracking and a clean user interface.
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