Esente

Inspiration

Each year, tons of food is thrown out before it’s eaten. More than 37 million people, however, struggle with hunger in the United States, including more than 11 million children. How can we fight back against food waste and help those people in need of America? Esente might be a solution for it.

What it does

Esente means "free" in Italian. Our application does provide a free food platform and benefits everyone who involves in.

If you can’t eat all of the food that you have at home or in an event, donate it by posting information on our app!
If you can't afford expensive food, you may get them and only pay for the delivery fee!
If you are a Uber/Lyft/Postmates/... driver, open our app and find an opportunity to earn more!

How We built it

We build Esente with

Node.js/Express as the backbone and use MongoDB as database
Google’s Map API for geocoding and Cloud Vision API for image recognition
Adobe Creative Suite for user interface/visual design
Kotlin for front-end styling and application design

We used some of our sponsor's technologies and learn more about the work they do

Google Cloud Platform, e.g. Google Map API, Google Vision API
XMATTERS, e.g. sending notifications to our users

Challenges I ran into

come up with an idea that fulfils our requirement
technical questions

Accomplishments that I'm proud of & What I learned

We are so proud of coming up with an original idea that focuses on Social Justice, i.e. Sustainability and Equity, in a short amount of time
We are most proud of how much we learned in such a short period of time.
We learned how powerful Google’s Cloud API is. We were able to visualize the geolocation information and process our photos with ease using the APIs. Meanwhile, we get access to XMatters service of sending notifications to users with a few lines of code.