About Ham Eats

Summary

Ham Eats is a web app that puts every Hamilton dining hall menu in one place, so you can see what Commons, McEwen, the Diner and the Little Pub are serving without clicking around. It's still a demo! Right now I'm doing product research to find the layout that makes it easiest for Hamilton students to check the menus.

Motivation

Hi! I'm Brandon Taylor '28, the creator of Ham Eats! I got tired of the dining menu app glitching out, loading forever, or not loading at all, and of tapping 10 times just to see what McEwen and Commons were serving. So I decided to build a site that pulls everything I wanted into a single convenient page. The menus come straight from Nutrislice, and so far my friends and I have found they match what's actually being served in the dining halls!

Product Research

Ham Eats is currently testing several home page layouts. I want to find the easiest way for the campus to read all of the dining data (every hall, menu, allergen category and calorie count) while keeping it as convenient as possible. Whichever layout students use the most will end up king of the hill and become the Ham Eats layout!

Design Decisions

I chose to make Ham Eats a web app to make development and maintenance a lot easier, since I didn't need the features of a native app. (Moreover, I don't have to wait on App Store reviews: every update reaches everyone the moment I publish it.)

Now through their phone's default web browser, anyone on iPhone or Android can add Ham Eats to their home screen, where it opens just like a regular app! It even works offline and shows the last menus it loaded.

Every hall's menu is on one page to minimize the number of taps it takes to decide where to eat. Tap any food to see its nutrition, allergens and ingredients. Since there's no single right answer for how to lay all of this out, the demo lets you choose between several layouts.

I built Ham Eats with Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, hosted on Vercel. The server fetches the menus from Nutrislice ahead of time and saves a copy, so the site loads fast, and if a refresh fails it keeps showing the last good menus instead of spinning forever.

Credits

Created by Brandon Taylor '28. Launched September 23, 2026.