🥗 Better Food Logs – Project Story

🧠 Inspiration

The inspiration for Better Food Logs began with Bedir, who had been logging his meals for over five years. In that time, tracking food became a powerful tool in helping him reach and maintain fitness goals. His experience showed the real value in understanding one’s food intake, built on the timeless principle: Calories In vs. Calories Out.

However, during this time, common food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal and FatSecret revealed major limitations:

• MyFitnessPal often felt too slow and cluttered with features.
• FatSecret, while more lightweight, lacked meaningful reporting and ran on outdated technology.
• Some newer AI-based apps exist, but they are often too expensive or overly complex for everyday users.

From this realization, the idea of Better Food Logs was born: a simpler, faster, and more accessible way to log food.

What started as one person's need quickly turned into a shared mission, as Julian, Vijay, and Damy joined forces with Bedir to bring the concept to life.

The mission:

• Include only essential features people will actually use
• Make food logging as frictionless as possible
• Keep it free and user-friendly

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🚀 What It Does

Better Food Logs allows users to log and track meals with minimal friction. There’s no clutter, no distractions—just an easy way to enter foods, monitor calories, and stay consistent.

The focus is on speed, usability, and meaningful data.

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🏗️ How We Built It

We built the application using modern web technologies and rapid prototyping tools:

• Bolt – Used to create and validate the first prototype
• Next.js – Framework of choice for the frontend
• Supabase – Backend services and user authentication
• PostgreSQL – For storing food and log data
• Vercel – For quick deployment and live hosting

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🚧 Challenges We Faced

• Sourcing nutrition data was tougher than expected—we had to explore multiple options before landing on usable sets.
• Dealing with page function bugs and database logic issues took significant testing and debugging.
• Striking the right balance between minimalism and functionality was an ongoing discussion.

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🏅 Accomplishments We’re Proud Of

• Built a functional web app with a 4-person team in a short amount of time
• Managed to stay within budget (we only spent on coffee, honestly!)
• Launched an app that worked well and sparked new ideas for what’s next

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📚 What We Learned

• Teamwork and focused collaboration can achieve a lot in a short time
• Tools like Bolt help bring ideas to life faster than traditional wireframing
• Some team members gained new experience with:
  • Supabase for backend/auth
  • Vercel for deployment
  • React, PostgreSQL, and JSON handling

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🔮 What’s Next for Better Food Logs

We’re planning to:

• Develop a mobile version of the app
• Add smarter features to support healthy food choices
• Explore simple analytics to help users see patterns in their habits

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🛠️ Built With

• Supabase API
• JavaScript
• Next.js
• PostgreSQL
• JSON
• Bolt (for prototyping)
• Vercel (for hosting)