In places like the UK (where this is mostly focused on at the moment) quite a lot of the takeaways serving food are border-line legal in terms of hygiene. In the information age, the 'ignorance is bliss' approach doesn't cut it for me any more, it's time we knew exactly what was going into that shady looking kebab you ordered on a Friday night :-)
In the past, you could judge a takeaway when going to collect but with online delivery usage spreading rapidly, users are left completely clueless as to a restaurant's hygiene record.
MunchDB, a small extension for Chrome, hopes to solve this pain point by displaying the Food Standards Agency's hygiene rating of each takeaway directly on Just Eat, Hungry House and Deliveroo. It also uncovers takeaways that are trading under different names online to escape the fact they have a poor rating.
I'll let the makers @djm_ and @lilianakastilio talk a bit more about why they built it..
@jasondainter Thanks Jason!
This project actually first started life while we were travelling South America earlier this year, I was teaching @lilianakastilio the basics of development and we needed something to work towards - and this ended up being it. It worked pretty damn well!
Our work here is enabled here by the wonderful open government data movement in the UK, so we'd like to say a thanks to the Food Standards Agency for supporting that and enabling us to use their APIs.
@lilianakastilio is unfortunately currently on a plane to Slovenia and is gutted to be missing this but I am around to answer anybody's questions.
Thanks Product Hunt!
This is a Chrome extension, but Firefox and Opera should be going live within the next few days.
A little background on the tech for those of you in to that:
So there's 3 main components: the core & API, the scraper and the extension itself. We scrape the sites in question, then do the lookups ourselves in a number of different ways and record the results. We found the other extensions out there quite slow as they worked client side and relied on doing one lookup per restaurant directly to the FSA's API. This meant that on some Just Eat listing pages with 200-300 restaurants, your browser would basically be caning the server powering the FSA API.. not good and not fast. Because we do the lookups beforehand, our extension only does 1 request per page and performs a lot better.
* The scraper handles scraping the sites so that we know about all the restaurants on there before you do, that bit is written in Python with thanks to the wonderful Scrapy project. It writes its results to Amazon S3.
* The core picks up the scraped results from S3 and does the lookups with the FSA, storing the results in with Postgres. This bit was written in Elixir using the Phoenix framework for the API and was quite easily the nicest part to work on, couldn't recommend them more. Both are proper workhorses and come with beautiful new tooling.
* The extension is written in ES6/ES2015 JavaScript and is open source and viewable on github at https://github.com/munchdb/munch.... It currently only supports Chrome, but as I said Firefox + Opera are moments away.
Happy to answer any technical questions too :)
MunchDB
MunchDB