deMeeter

Inspiration

The United Nations lists 17 Sustainable Development Goals for a better tomorrow. We targeted Goal 12: a call for sustainable consumption and production, and Goal 4, aimed to educate everyone regarding harmful effects of the current system. We felt that this social cause had a surprising lack of support, especially from the tech sector.

The UN states that the 8 level food system causes waste at every level, meaning tons of food is wasted before it even gets to the grocery store. In addition, they list climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution as side effects of irresponsible consumption/production. Eating farm to table would also lead to a healthier diet and improve nutrition, which are common motifs among the UN’s 17 goals.

We thought, why not eliminate the 6 plus middlemen and buy from farmers themselves? This would reduce food waste at every level, creating a responsible, farm-to-table consumption cycle.

We definitely thought this idea was feasible. After all, Davis has farmer’s markets twice a week, and Yolo County has many more. We also looked to explore the D2C element of buying produce from farmers as we felt that space had been dominated by artisan brands rather than local ones.

So we came up with deMeeter!

What it does

deMeeter is a website that allows farmers to connect directly with locals in their area. Farmers can list their fresh produce for sale or say what times they will be attending the farmers market. Consumers can order directly on the website or find out where their closest farmers market will be. They can learn more about the hardworking farmer growing their food and also know when they can go to a farmer’s market where that farmer will be present.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to develop the front end of the application and MongoDB as our datastore on the backend. We used NodeJS and ExpressJS toWe accessed the Google Maps API to show users events that are local to them.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues storing data and had to spend a good amount of time learning how to implement Mongo-DB. We also tried to implement Azure but struggled to find a balance between simplicity of use and affordability for this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a full stack Web App that, with a little refining, can be used to help sustainability.
Learning how to work with several interesting technologies along the way

What we learned

We learned how to implement Mongo-DB on the backend. We also learned how to access and work with the Google Maps API as well as many of the other technologies mentioned above.