118 Food Chain

Inspiration

43% of all food in restaurants ends up in the garbage without ever being touched by a customer. This struck a nerve because 40% of all people in the United States alone are food insecure. The only potential solution that currently exists is food banks. For restaurants, donating food requires significant effort, which is the primary reason so much food is wasted. The lack of a clear solution for such a fundamental problem in society prompted us to create FoodChain.

What it does

The core idea of FoodChain is to connect consumers in need of food to restaurants that have food surplus. Restaurants have the ability to create "posts" which consist of the surplus foods they have. The consumer simply has to enter their address and mode of transportation and our program finds nearby restaurants. The consumer can also search for specific ingredients that restaurants have listed. We have also used AllRecipes to develop an automatic meal creator using available ingredients nearby.

How we built it

The front end is entirely built in Next.JS. We used a firebase database to store cloud variables (restaurant posts). The backend is built using Flask, a Python framework. The two communicate using POST requests. The Python code finds nearby restaurants using the google maps API, and implements the automatic meal creator feature, while the front end deals with all other capabilities (styling, displaying data on the webpage, etc.).

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the Python flask to Next.JS was a significant obstacle in our development journey. Neither of us had ever fully integrated a frontend and backend, and we didn't pick the best 2 frameworks to integrate. So while the core capabilities were not difficult to code, the integration of these capabilities took a lot of stack-overflowing until we finally reached our solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of both the core idea, and our implementation of python and next.js. We are also proud that we are seeking to solve an imminent problem in our society.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate a backend and frontend effectively. For us, this was a huge learning curve because of our lack of experience regarding this topic.

What's next for Food Chain

We plan to host this permanently spread our mission.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• firebase
• firestore
• flask
• github
• google-maps
• next
• nextjs
• python
• react.js
• requests