Eatable: An Application That Helps People With Food Allergies Check and Locate Allergen-Free Food Products

Abstract

Due to the limited number of allergen-free foods found in the market and the stores’ inconsistencies in carrying such foods, people living with food allergies have a hard time finding foods they can safely eat. Food allergic people spend a lot of time reading ingredient lists of products at the store to verify their safety without knowing whether the store even carries any allergen-free products, and when the product is not found in the store, they go to a different store with the same uncertainty. In this project, I have created an application that solves this problem by enabling users to locate allergen-free foods through a mobile app so that they don’t have to waste their time in search of safe foods. Eatable is a cloud based hybrid mobile application built using crowd-sourced data from users. It integrates with various third-party web services to build product-to-store mapping database that serves as the foundation of the system. The application is built with technologies that are performant, flexible and scalable.