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Faculty of Arts and Science School of Computing third-year undergraduate student Chloe Houvardas recently competed in the hackseoul event in Korea and finished first, earning $5,000 for her app designed to bring smart meal planning, cost-savvy shopping, and effortless cooking to every home kitchen.

Her team was also chosen to present the app design to the Korean venture capital firm , Korea's first startup accelerator, launched in January 2010, to help young entrepreneurs succeed by replicating the DNA of senior entrepreneurs and replicating it into young entrepreneurs who think differently about the world.

She competed on a team that featured Queen’s University commerce student Noah Yu and several students from Seoul National University.

“We met at a club called the ,” Chloe says about how she got to know Noah. “We had to assemble the team, create a pitch idea, and send in a prototype. Noah asked me to join the team and do the programming for the app because I’m a computer science student. I built their demo which they presented at Primer as I don’t speak Korean. They also took that app to hackseoul where it placed first overall.”

A screenshot of Yorigo, a new app Chloe developed along with her team.

Chloe explains she started programming in elementary school and, through that early interest, she discovered hackathons, which she fell in love with participating in, especially during COVID which she says she competed in several hackathons virtually. She jumped at the chance to work with Noah to design the Yorigo demo.

“I’ve always been a builder at heart. I’m good at taking a problem and creating a coding solution for it. I found out, through my friends in the commerce program, that my ideas could become something much bigger.”

She explains Yorigo has several different applications and runs using the e-commerce company . a South-Korean-founded Delaware-incorporated technology and online retail company similar to Amazon. The app has three different applications:

• One-Click Recipes from Videos - Watch a cooking video and instantly get a complete recipe with ingredients, steps, and nutritional information. No more pausing and rewinding.
• Optimized Weekly Meal Plans - Select multiple recipes for the week. Yorigo intelligently combines ingredients across recipes to minimize waste and maximize savings.
• Smart Shopping Cart - Get the exact quantities you need at optimized prices. No more buying small expensive portions or throwing away unused ingredients.

“It’s hard to buy groceries for a single person to ensure you have the right ingredients, and you don’t have waste,” Chloe explains. “We also found Gen Z and the younger generation also find their recipes on TikTok. They save it but never touch it again. This app solves these two problems. You can link the recipe into the Yorigo app and it will break down the ingredients you need, give you the instructions to make it and, once you have enough recipes stored, it will group recipes based on the ingredients needed so you can buy ingredients in bulk for more than one recipe.”

She adds as the app is developed, it could be integrated into the Canadian market down the road.

Learn more about the hackseoul event .