Nourish Me
Creators: Priscilla
School: High School Students from Cristo Rey Brooklyn
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Project Themes: Other
Project Type: App Design & Applied AI
About this Project
NourishMe is a free app helping teens and families fight food insecurity with smart tools and affordable meals. It helps you make smart meals, save money, and track what’s in your kitchen, all in one place. The app does checks in , suggests affordable meals, gives reminders, shows nearby food pantries, and even has an AI chatbot who's like your in app friend who gives you advice & motivation.
Project Links
What the Judges are Saying
Priscilla did a great job identifying a need in her community and addressing it with an application. She chose to make a mobile app which was very smart since most folks are making decisions about food on the go. She included a log-in screen with an Auth0 option for better security and easier password management. She also leveraged a bottom tab navigation which is a user-friendly pattern on many mobile apps. Her app included bright colors and friendly branding which was consistent on all pages. In her research she mentions that food scarcity can feel overwhelming and her app should be free of judgement which I absolutely LOVED and it made me wonder if she needed to include the progress feature where health is scored and tracked over time. I think this app is super strong without that feature and it may make users feel undue pressure. Overall this app was cheerful and well-executed and Priscilla should be very proud of what she created!
Great work, Priscilla! NourishMe is a great way to address a real need in your community—and best of all, the functionality is straightforward. I love how you've incorporated dietary restrictions, meal ideas, and community resources while keeping privacy top of mind. This app has the potential to give teens more autonomy in what they eat and how they access resources. One way to make it even more impactful is to let users modify the progress tracker based on specific goals, whether people want to eat more meals throughout the day, drink more water, add more fruits and veggies, or something similar. Everyone has different goals, and some metrics might be triggering for students if they're struggling with disordered eating. Thanks for sharing your work and taking the time to work on this project!
This is a great concept and the app design was really well executed. You've targeted a critical need in the community and this app has real potential to improve the lives of the target users. You've incorporated a number of creative features that should make it easy for the users to make healthy choices.
One of the key abilities of an app like this, and it looks like it's part of your plan, would be to track the user's nutritional intake to recommend meals that would target recent deficiencies. One big problem with tracking apps that require manual input, such as one that expects the user to report all of the things they eat, is that manually inputting the data is usually so time consuming that most users can't be bothered and soon stop using the app. But, in this case, I think there could be a great application of AI. If users could just talk to the app and tell it what they ate for each meal, it would be much faster and more convenient to input the data. And the AI could ask questions to fill in the gaps, like "What did you have to drink with that?" "Was it a small, medium, or large portion?" "Did you have vegetables on the burger?"...that sort of thing.
Another great application would be something that plans meals around ingredients that they have on hand. I volunteer with a food pantry and I know that we end up distributing a lot of ingredients that our clients may never have eaten before, or we end up with a lot of one ingredient. So it would be very useful if the app could suggest recipes that use kale or turnips or whatever.
I would really like an app like this that could keep track of the food I have in hand in the house and plan meals around that, and it seems like that could be another extension of this.
Anyway, great job overall.
One of the key abilities of an app like this, and it looks like it's part of your plan, would be to track the user's nutritional intake to recommend meals that would target recent deficiencies. One big problem with tracking apps that require manual input, such as one that expects the user to report all of the things they eat, is that manually inputting the data is usually so time consuming that most users can't be bothered and soon stop using the app. But, in this case, I think there could be a great application of AI. If users could just talk to the app and tell it what they ate for each meal, it would be much faster and more convenient to input the data. And the AI could ask questions to fill in the gaps, like "What did you have to drink with that?" "Was it a small, medium, or large portion?" "Did you have vegetables on the burger?"...that sort of thing.
Another great application would be something that plans meals around ingredients that they have on hand. I volunteer with a food pantry and I know that we end up distributing a lot of ingredients that our clients may never have eaten before, or we end up with a lot of one ingredient. So it would be very useful if the app could suggest recipes that use kale or turnips or whatever.
I would really like an app like this that could keep track of the food I have in hand in the house and plan meals around that, and it seems like that could be another extension of this.
Anyway, great job overall.
