Project Description

Topic Overview

ShopMate is going to be designed to be a multipurpose shopping and nutritional app created to ease people into things such as shopping, keeping track of your inventory in your kitchen, suggested recipes based off your ingredients and even nutritional tracking for macronutrients. The first feature that the Shop Mate team plan to implement is a basic shopping list, just simply adding products that you need to a list and storing it for later use when you go shopping. Later revisions of this feature will update to possibly include integration into online ordering at Coles or Woolworths, so with the click of a button you can add to cart what you have on your list for an online shop.

ShopMate is an easy to use mobile app that can provide the user fundemental tools to assist them in creating a healthy meal with ingredients on hand, where a time-poor consumer may struggle to think of a meal to prepare, ShopMate is there to give the spark of inspiration in preparing a healthy, yet delicious meal without the need of going to the grocery store. Its intention of use is to be a multipurpose program where grocery shopping can be automated based on previous shopping experience, providing a nutritional guide and being a portable recipe on demand. By doing this, it supports local businesses - large and small, it provides the consumer a reliable necessity to have on hand and it has a functional utility that serves a purpose. A byproduct by having this on hand will provide recommendations on what to make and for consumers to track what is in their inventory, creating a byproduct, of reducing food waste.

Motivation

The motivation behind our project Shop Mate is the idea of having a whole collection of amazing features at your fingertips. Inspiration was drawn from the MyFitnessPal as well as ideas drawn from the convenience of online shopping. The amount of times where I’m stuck for ideas for dinner and can’t think of anything to make and wish that I had an app that would tell me what I can make with the ingredients that I have in the house. This is where the idea sparked for Shop Mate, an app where I could just put in the ingredients that I have in the kitchen and then I get a list of recipes available for food that I have. The app obviously is a high demand task that will require multiple revisions however with phase 1 of the app coming in the form of a simple shopping list. Having an interest in nutrition through a brief period of study as well as an interest in fitness, I'm fascinated by the idea of tracking macronutrients and the idea of having an app that brings the convenience of online shopping together with a stored database of available products with their given macro nutrients is a huge motivator for the app too.

Landscape

In the market of apps that are available, the closest competitor is a program called KitchenPal. Admitedly, before completing the first group assignment, the team felt the concept of ShopMate to being truly unique, with the implementation of macronutrients, a business plus feature - it really seemed that there wasn't a platform like it. However upon further exploration, KitchenPal repeats some of what we considered innovative functions, but at the end of the day - what product doesn't have a competitor? Based on the artefact presentation of the application, its value proposition scratches the surface and leaves a lot of opportunity for the project to further expand given the vision established in the first assignment. The functionality and benefits it provides are similair, the distribution of information of meals would be more expansive , however the difference is where ShopMate's partnerships would be well communicated to our customers, such as the prospective stakeholder relationship with Woolworths, Coles, DoorDash and GoPeople. The business plus feature would be an innovative logistical solution that would support local businesses in a sense that KitchenPal doesn't, which is more geared to the individual consumer.