afoodable

Preventing food waste by connecting suppliers (with excess food) with community organizers to distribute food to people in need.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the repurposing of excess food to reduce food waste as much as possible while helping organizations that provide for people in need. Web articles that inspired us include: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/buying-canned-goods-to-donate-to-food-banks-is-inefficient-and-misguided-donate-money-instead, https://www.foodbankscanada.ca/Get-Involved/Support-Your-Local-Food-Bank.aspx

What it does

Afoodable is a website that facilitates a transparent and visual way to donate excess food. We address the problem of donations becoming black-boxed to donors, and that certain items don't make their way to those in need for any reason. We support full contact between the supplier and receiver. The supplier details items with properties such as images, description, and tags. The supplier is rated and the receiver writes a review indicating exactly how the food is used. Both parties are able to see with numbers and visuals of the exchange through their dashboards and the website's spotlight stories.

How we built it

Codebase used HTML/CSS, Javascript, and Cockroach DB Mockups and slides were created using Figma Everything is documented on Notion

Challenges we ran into

Our idea had to be fleshed out on the go instead of before coding happened, since coding took more time than expected. With coding, we learned to use Cockroach DB on the fly. The several moving parts and changes in functionality had to be addressed last-minute as well. The hand-drawn assets took time to create, and polish had to be sacrificed to save time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Cranking out a concept in less than 2 hours Learning Cockroach DB and ReactJS Our UI design meets WCAG accessibility standards for colour contrast

What we learned

Many charities have to turn away food due to people not knowing what they wanted, and some prefer money donations over food. ReactJS can be difficult to implement only where needed.

What's next for Afoodable

The next steps include thinking of a sound business model. Potential lies with the stickers and packaging that suppliers need to use. We can also investigate how Afoodable can reach out to rural areas to harvest excess or fallen farm produce.

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