Chicken Dinner

Inspiration

Restaurants play an important role in serving society through high-quality meals that we otherwise would not have time to prepare ourselves. To maintain this level of quality, however, ingredients must be fresh every day. Subsequently, this means a lot of food waste. Millions of pounds of leftover ingredients and pre-made dishes are sent to the landfill every day. At the same time, millions of people struggle to find their next meal every day. We wanted to develop software that could help bridge this gap and reallocate resources into the hands of people who need it

What it does

Chicken Dinner is the platform we developed to serve as a bridge, connecting restaurants, grocery stores, and households with surplus food to soup kitchens and food banks in need. By leveraging real-time technology and a user-friendly interface, Chicken Dinner facilitates the donation of excess food, ensuring that it reaches those who can benefit from it most, rather than going to waste.

How we built it

React.js
Node.js
Express.js
MongoDB
Mongoose
Google Geocasts
Solace PubSub+

Challenges we ran into

We definitely ran into a lot of challenges connecting the different components together with the PubSub model. It was something new to all of us, and a lot of time was spent trying things out and getting it to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how much we were able to develop within such a short period of time. We took quite a while to settle on an idea, and two of our members were spent from a 6-hour trip to get to this hackathon. But our teamwork and hard work allowed us to push through and get an app finished that we are all proud of.

What we learned

This project was the first time any of us touched Solace PubSub+. Originally we didn't even know what it was, but after the opening ceremonies and Solace workshop, we thought it was something worth learning. We learned a lot about the Publisher-Subscriber model, and the importance of transmitting real time data.

What's next for Chicken Dinner

One middle piece that would be nice to introduce for Chicken Dinner is food quality validation. In order words, before food is placed in the hands of soup kitchens, there should be some inspection of the quality. One idea is to leverage AI in inspection through image analysis and automated physical tests. This would save the need to hire more people and get the job done much faster. Another idea for Chicken Dinner is to connect to the local community as well, and any excess ingredients they may have otherwise thrown away too. Although the quantity is nowhere as high as restaurants and supermarkets, the added amount is still significant