Food Cloud Seattle

As a country, about 30-40% of our food supply is wasted while 1 in 8 people struggle with putting food on the table. Forty percent of food waste is from the food industry where stores throw out ‘imperfect’ foods or food that are not popular enough or sold by date. Our main inspiration for creating this app came from finding a solution to address hunger, food waste management and renewable energy.

By programming this app, we can support existing programs in Seattle to better connect food suppliers with local food banks and bio-fuel companies. We included bio-fuel companies as a target group because we acknowledge that not all food can be consumed and added a feature in our app to link food providers with bio-fuel companies in Seattle who can convert the expired or in-edible food into energy. Our mission in creating this app is to help the food insecure, such as low-income families and those without homes, who will directly benefit from our design. However, we were limited in the type of technology that would connect them directly to supermarkets or food banks since this population may not have access to smartphones. Therefore, the app will be utilized by supermarkets, food banks and bio-fuel companies within Seattle in order to help low-income families and the homeless. The app itself has the necessary information for our users to schedule a pickup time and location by utilizing a map of food banks in the Seattle metropolitan area.

Initially, we struggled with finding the appropriate scope for our app because we had many ideas for the development and the future of this application, but after thinking about what we wanted the core functions of the app to be, we were able to narrow it down to the Seattle area. Some other challenges we ran into was the problem of connecting supermarkets to food banks and connecting food banks to bio-fuel companies. We were able to link these different target groups in the application so the food banks, as the mediators, could access the supermarkets’ information and the bio-fuel companies’ information and vice versa to efficiently deliver the food that would otherwise be thrown away.

We created this app by first researching the statistics of food waste in America and Seattle’s homeless and low-income population as well as what other non-profit food organizations have implemented technology to help with hunger and food waste management. Afterwards, we all mapped out what app pages we would need and how to connect the different target groups of the program before actually programming the app on Figma. This program can be expanded into other major cities who similarly struggle with homelessness and food waste management all around the world. In the future after polishing the features we currently have, we can incorporate a volunteer section to help coordinate people who would like to assist with transporting food to food banks and include a registration form for ordinary individuals who would like to donate expired or in-edible food to food banks. With a strong mission statement and a good foundation for our app in Seattle, this product could really improve life for the food insecure and be financially beneficial for all parties involved with food waste management and renewable energy.

Built With

• figma