Feed'em all

Inspiration

Hunger kills more people than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. However, on the other hand, one third of the food prepared is wasted. I have seen several restaurants, grocery stores, cafes and bakeries throw away food because it is expired. We wondered if there was a way for businesses to get these food to people in need of them. This pressing issue has been there for a long time and there is no proper use of technology to mitigate the situation.

What it does

Our website lets restaurants update it when they have excess food typically at the end of the day when they are closing and volunteers in that region can help distribute the food to the people in need of it. Volunteers are notified when a restaurant in their region is giving away food via SMS who can then contact the restaurant and collect it.

How we built it

We used Java Jersey REST API as backend and angularJS for the front end. mongoDB hosted on mLab was our database. The website is hosted on DigitalOcean. We used tropo API to send SMS notifications. We used Uber API to get a fair estimate from the volunteers location to the restaurant. We used Google Geocode API to get address auto fill and fetch lat long values.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some issues with getting Google maps address auto fill to work with AngularJS. Ran into an issue with the app working on localhost but not when deployed to digital ocean. Turns out it was a Java compatibility issue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building the MVP in under 24 hours. We made a really good looking website.

What we learnt

We learnt to use the Tropo API to send SMS. Learnt how to build the REST endpoints in a service oriented architecture. Learnt how to use the Google Visualization API with AngularJS

What's next for Feed'em all

To add capability to request uber by replying to the SMS notification. To build the backend as a public API so that it can be integrated into the existing softwares that the restaurant uses like OpenTable and Zomato.