Cheap Eats

Inspiration

We noticed that many restaurants throw away perfectly good food at the end of each day as they are unable to sell it. We also noticed that businesses usually had sales near the end of the day to try to sell out all of their food. . It was also surprising that very few businesses donated their end-of-the-day food even though there are no legal constraints as the Donation of Food Act (Ontario) prevents businesses and individuals from legal consequences for food donated in good cause. We decided that there had to be a better way to deal with all the leftover food, both for customers and businesses, so with that in mind, we created Cheap Eats.

What it does

Our app helps connect customers to businesses during the closing hours of the day to reduce or eliminate food waste as customers can purchase discounted food and businesses can make some money off of it. We have an intuitive user interface that allows users to see available restaurants in their area, the cost, and the number of food items left in the restaurant. This provides convenience to customers which greatly increases the chances of them buying food from businesses at the end of the day, purchasing food that would otherwise be thrown away. Our app also has a charity tab for businesses, where they can set up a pickup time to donate their food to a local charity, instead of throwing the food into the trash. The charities would then redistribute the food to those in need.

Our app starts with a login screen that allows users to log in (using an email and password) either as a customer or a restaurant. By clicking on the restaurant login, they are then prompted to their public profile page in case they need to make any changes. They can also update the number of available discount meals, and the time they are available until, and the price, all in the app, allowing customers to have the most up-to-date information regarding food availability.

On the customer side, they too would log in using their email and password. They would then be brought to the home screen that shows currently available items and items that will go on discount soon. Again, these options show the number of meals left, as well as the price. Users can change their location to see more relevant results. For a complete list of food options available, they can navigate to the search page to search up specific keywords, or they can filter the list based on price or availability or discount end time. Once they decide they like a meal, they can press the heart icon to like it and the meal will appear in their favorites tab. This allows users to add meals they are interested in, and view them later at the same time. When they decide to purchase the meal, they will need to travel to the specified restaurant in the app and buy it there. However, our app would save users the hassle of determining what food options or availability different restaurants have in their area.

How we built it

The project was coded using the programming language Dart, and the framework Flutter by Google. Different pages were used for each of the different aspects of the app, and elements were custom-made to fit the feel and aesthetic of our app. Our code was compiled into .apk files which allowed us to run it on our Android emulator.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into included depreciated code as a lot of the online tutorials were outdated, resulting in the content presented being useless. Instead, we had to rely on the APIs as well as official documentation along with our intuition to code our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of the accomplishments that we are proud of include being able to create a functional app that can be exported onto an Android device as a .apk file within 2 days. We had limited knowledge of the framework and the coding language, so grasping the concepts in such a short amount of time is an achievement in itself.

What we learned

We learned the basics of app building such as user input, screen resolutions, how page animations work, etc.

What's next for Cheap Eats

A next step would be to have Cheap Eats accept payments through the app to further smooth the transaction process of buying discounted food, both for the businesses and for the customers. This in turn would help shed some positive light on the massive problem of food waste.

Built With

• dart
• flutter