In a world where we are inundated with a plethora of food choices, making healthy choices for ourselves and our families can often be very difficult. The desire to "Enable South Africans to make wiser choices" with regard to food and one's eating habits is the primary focus of "Gobble" an intelligent solution to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Michael Evans ,Wayne Huang and Kuziwa Sachikonye

 Gobble is a mobile application developed by UCT final year Electrical and Computer Engineering students Wayne Huang, Michael Evans and Kuziwa Sachikonye. This application was a runner up in the illustrious annual GradHack hosted by insurance giant Discovery. It managed to snatch up second place ahead of 30 other student development teams chosen from over 200 entries.

Gobble takes the shopping experience to a new level, beginning at the store with the user creating a shopping list and going through the store and monitoring the food items that the user has bought. Over time, the algorithm behind the app suggests better food alternatives and the in-built QR Code Reader scans nutritional information from the pre-existing barcodes on food items and pulls up the user-relevant suggestions, information and alternatives.

As one completes the shopping process, the food that the user has bought moves into the "virtual fridge" component of the application. Here the user is able to get a visual breakdown of their consumption and they are able to customize this data to help them as they build up healthier diets.

If that was all that this little app did - that would be great enough, but the app further goes onto make recipe suggestions based on what is in the fridge as well, and the user is able to then populate their next shopping list based on their favourite recipes or new recipes they discover within the app.

"This was a fantastic project built over a night of "hacking" against our talented competition. Helping to make shopping and healthy living a more bearable if not pleasurable experience," said Kuziwa Sachikonye.