Inspiration
Food waste in the USA is a huge problem, with 108 billion pounds of food thrown out in the United States. That equates to more than $161 billion worth of food thrown away each year. Of that $161 billion worth of food wasted, $20-30 billion is from restaurants. 10.5 percent (13.8 million) of U.S. households were food insecure at some time during 2020. Additionally, college students in Atlanta frequently look for more affordable food options. There isn’t a service connecting restaurants and consumers for discounted excess food in Atlanta.
What it does
Awayste provides a platform that connects restaurants with consumers to reduce the amount of leftover food that would otherwise be thrown out.
Restaurants use the add item page to input items that are leftover and would otherwise go into the trash bin. They can use our inventory page to keep track of the items that they have ready to sell at a discounted price. Awayste helped to reduce the food waste that restaurants produce and makes it accessible for consumers to get high quality food at an affordable price. Items “drop” at a certain time, and a countdown shows consumers how much time they have left until pickup!
On the consumer end, they can use the listings page to browse the items that restaurants publish. They can then add items they want to their cart and see the total price. Here, we used some items from Sweet Hut Bakery, a Georgia Tech favorite just a mile from campus.
We connected the NCR Catalog API to manage the inventory for vendors. In the future, we would love to use more such as the CDM, Order, Images, and Sites APIs to make our web app more functionable for NCR customers. With Awayste, our hope is to positively impact the community around us in Atlanta and provide incentives for businesses to adopt sustainable practices.
How we built it
Our platform was made with:
- React
- Javascript
- CSS
- HTML
- JSON
Challenges we ran into
We had trouble using the NCR API and spent a lot of time trying to connect to it. Most of our team was also new to web development and using CSS.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very happy with the UI of the web app. Additionally, the presentation we put together and overall cohesiveness of our project is very fulfilling.
What we learned
We learned a lot more about how restaurants deal with food waste in Atlanta as well as NCR's technology that helps to support restaurants.
What's next for Awayste
Since many people struggle with allergies, we want to include tags and filters. This will help consumers to find the items they want much faster. In addition, a rewards system would help to incentivize consumers to visit restaurants with rewards which helps restaurants to build brand presence. By adding a Google Maps API, users will be able to get a better sense of closer restaurants and use a different view.
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