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Show HN: GroceryTrip – Turn receipts into nutritional information (github.com)

18 points by Zanovis ↗ HN
Hey HN, I've been working on a Flutter app for the past few months that turns receipts into useful nutrition information. The aim of this project is to make it easier to understand the nutrition and ingredients in our groceries simply by scanning a receipt.

How GroceryTrip works (more detail in github repo):

1. Take a photo of your receipt (remains local, there's a demo receipt in the app if you don't have one on-hand) 2. Crop photo to relevant barcodes/names of products 3. View receipt Summary/Details 4. Optional: Contribute missing barcodes

It's a super simple app currently, but I think it has potential to provide more insights into the food we purchase every week (viewing grocery trends over time may be useful). Any feedback or suggestions are appreciated!

https://github.com/zanovis/GroceryTrip

8 comments

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hp6
Really nice idea, the point I don’t get is why we need to crop the image? If the barcode numbers are in a specific format why can’t we just filter the OCR results?
Zanovis
Technically it could use some more advanced regex/filtering on the OCR output, you're right! I found that with some receipts, you actually can omit cropping with some exceptions. I'd definitely like to remove the need for cropping altogether.
sf4lifer
Neat. It'd be interesting to include recipes ideas based on what you've purchased. If your list is lacking in some key nutrition, it'd be cool if it suggested what to buy the next time you go to the store
cypherg
The main issues I see with using this for any type of nutrition insight is that the vast majority of people that buy groceries are:

1 - buying them for more than themselves (e.g. family, partner, etc)

2 - You don't eat all of the groceries you buy every week. 1 bag of sugar may last a year.

3 - grocery receipts are really long and awkward to take pictures of.

4 - It doesn't take into account other food/nutrition you get outside of your home.

5 - The huge rise in curbside grocery orders means far fewer physical receipts

6 - Nutrition is very, very, personalized. There's not an effective way to make meaningful nutrition suggestions.

I suppose this could be useful to scan for any specific allergens, like if any of the groceries you purchased contain nuts or something. I love the idea of gathering stats about what you purchase though, whether it's food or not. I just assumed my regular grocery store (who are basically a tech company) could do a better job at tracking this than I ever could.

Zanovis
You nailed all the limitations of this app (and others like it) on the head :) The reality is that there will probably never be a foolproof way to understand our consumption/nutrition habits 100%, so my goal with this was to make it easier to understand at a high level what was in my groceries (that didn't require individual scans of each product).

I'm sure most chains have the purchase tracking for ads/marketing, but not sure how their data incorporates nutritional/ingredient data (if at all).

throwawaymobule
I'm still thoroughly annoyed that retailers don't let you easily access receipts in a programatic way. Many allow you to look at them online, if you have some form of loyalty card, but you can't just scan a barcode or punch in a number to get it anonymously.

Not least because it would simplify apps like this.

Granted, I may be a special case as someone who still has every receipt from the past ten years.

Zanovis
I agree. Hopefully there will be a day where grocery retailers provide access to their product data APIs to make this a smoother process. Or if the store provided a QR code on the receipt so you could quickly see information similar to what's on GroceryTrip.