Food Dash for Food Stash

A food delivery optimizer for Food Stash that uses donor and recipient location and pickup/dropoff times to find the best route for drivers.

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Inspiration

Food rescue organizations like Food Stash play a critical role in our local community to fight food insecurity, but manual logistics such emails, spreadsheets, and endless back-and-forth with donors and receivers be a pain point. We saw an opportunity to streamline this process and reduce food waste with a simple, smart tech solution.

What it does

Food Dash is a logistics optimization platform designed for food rescue organizations. It streamlines donor and recipient coordination through automated route generation based on real-time availability and geolocation.

  • Core Functionality:

  • Donor Intake: Donors submit food availability and preferred pickup time windows via a multi-step form.

  • Recipient Requests: Recipient organizations input their delivery availability and food needs.

  • Optimization Engine: Our backend algorithm processes time windows, food compatibility, and geospatial data to generate efficient delivery routes using a modified Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solver.

  • Interactive Map UI: Displays optimized routes and clustered donation zones to volunteers and dispatchers.

  • Volunteers and workers receive clear, optimized routes—no spreadsheets, no chaos!

How we built it

  • React with TypeScript for frontend interface
  • Tailwind for CSS
  • PostgreSQL for donor and recipient database
  • Google Maps API for location visualization
  • A novel route optimization algorithm to match donors, receivers based on availability and proximity that applies a Greedy Heuristic with time-window constraints to solve a simplified TSP for delivery routing. Incorporates Haversine formula for real-time distance calculations.

Challenges we ran into

There were three main challenges we ran into during the building process:

  • Google API integration
  • Connecting frontend to backend
  • Adapting traditional TSP algorithms to include pickup/dropoff time windows and perishability priorities under time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Writing our own route optimization algorithm
  • Making a fully functional backend and frontend
  • Pushing and pulling data to our database dynamically
  • Building a backend that can scale to multiple locations, donors/recipients, and deliveries

What we learned

  • Designing and building flexible systems with option for scalability

- Common challenges often faced by small nonprofit organizations and how technical solutions can help

What's next for Food Dash for Food Stash

  • Add functionality to register new donors and recipients directly from the platform
  • Optimise performance with caching frequently accessed data
  • Add authentication for different user profiles
  • Get feedback from the stakeholders
  • Integrate prediction models for delivery to better schedule and allocate volunteer resources
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