Food ResQ

A one-stop application to bridge the gap between excess food providers and distributors, with an aim to eradicate hunger. Find locations, book slots, & connect, all in one place to do the good deed!

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Inspiration

An approximate estimation of 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year. Food has and always will be the first and foremost primary necessity of the living world. At Food ResQ, we realize the importance of each grain and wish to do our part in reducing food-wastage and in-turn eliminating the world's hunger bit by bit.

We aim to bridge the gap between the restaurants, that deal with discarding the leftover-food daily, and those people(ResQ-ers) who wish to contribute and do a good deed by making sure the food reaches the right place. We connect the food providers and the food distributors by bringing them together and make the food-donation process easier and faster so that no one, who wishes to help the needy, finds it difficult just because he/she cannot find the medium to do so.

What makes Food ResQ different is that we not only care for the needy people but also keep in mind the struggle of the stray animals to find food to kill their hunger. Thus we provide an option for the Restaurants to post slots and distinguish the leftover food into categories separately for the poor needy beings as well as the strays. The locations of these restaurants can be easily viewed by our ResQ-uers on the map available and in-turn book the pickup slots at the same time.

Thus we bring to you Food ResQ, a one-stop application to connect excess food providers and distributors, with an aim to eradicate hunger. Find locations, book slots, & connect, all in one place to do the good deed!.

What it does

1. The website revolves around Restaurants acting as left-over food providers and ResQ-uers acting as the food distributors to the needy.
2. The Restaurants can post specific categories of food either for Needy people(i.e human editable food) or for Stray Animals(i.e animal edible food) along with stating the quantities and time slots available for pickup.
3. The ResQ-uers who wish to pick up this food from the restaurants and distribute it to the needy can book the slots opened by the Restaurants nearby and view the details specific to the food required .
4. The ResQ-uers can easily access the locations of the Restaurants marked on a world map to reach the venues with no extra effort.
5. We have made sure that filters specific to locations, and types of food available, help the users get a good picture of what they are actually seeking.
6. We intend to build mutual trust between the Restaurants and the ResQ-uers for a better process. Hence we have implemented a rating feature that will help them to rate each other on the basis of points such that it helps them get attention in the future.

How we built it

  • The website frontend was made using HTML, CSS, and javascript.
  • The website backend was made using Node JS and MongoDB as the database.
  • The backend is deployed on Google Cloud Platform (App Engine) and is up and live at https://resq-303417.appspot.com/.
  • We integrated the HERE Maps API in the frontend to pick out the exact locations of restaurants, thus making it easy for our ResQ-uers to reach and pick up from these providers.
  • The application is live at https://foodresq.netlify.app/
  • We used Domain.com to register a domain name for our website. https://fillhunger.space/

Challenges we ran into

Working on various high-level tech stacks was a challenging yet satisfying experience for all of Integrating a dynamic world map on the website for tracking and pointing out the exact location of using the HERE Maps API was time-consuming and challenging since we were doing it for the first time.

Integrating the front-end and back-end for booking specific time slots according to categories( Excess food for needy and green food for animals) connecting the food providers(Restaurants) and food distributors(ResQ-uers) was quite challenging.

The biggest hurdle was the CORS(Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) error that occurred time and again. At first, we could not identify the problem but learned the fix in the process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our main aim was to create an application that serves its purpose by helping in the community's growth as a whole and taking a step towards eradicating hunger around us, not only specific to the needy people but also to the stray animals on the road.

We are super proud of the fact that we learned various technical concepts from scratch during this weekend and ended up making an efficient and useful web application serving its purpose for society. This project gave us the opportunity to explore and work on something out of our comfort zone. We tried incorporating as many features as we could in this creation of ours, considering every use-case for our clients to get a seamless UX.

For the first time, we learned to use the Google Cloud Platform to deploy the backend of our web application. It was a bit challenging at first but eventually, we did figure out the whole process. Hosting the website on a different domain using Domain.com was also new to us but enjoyable at the same time.

We ended up building a project that would help create a huge difference in the way of living of the hungry and of course, getting acquainted with some great development experience which was a bit frustrating but fruitful at the same time.

After overcoming numerous hurdles, we are now much more confident as web developers and proud of being able to contribute to society in an efficient way.

What we learned

We learned to integrate several third-party APIs with our front-end for different functionalities. They are as follows :

1. OpenCage Geocoder API - Geolocation services used to pick locations
2. HERE Maps API - Display World Map and point out filter specific locations
3. Cloudinary API - Products and Services image gallery

Apart from the challenges, we successfully managed to incorporate these APIs into our project to make it as efficient as possible for the users.

What's next for Food ResQ

As far as future enhancements are concerned, we have planned to incorporate several advanced features pertaining to our user’s experience, and benefit.

1. Messaging Service: We have thought of implementing a messaging service between the Restaurants and the ResQ-uers for better communication .
2. Using blockchain for storing data: For security concerns, we are planning of incorporating blockchain for storing central data. This will ensure that the database is encrypted such that only authorized parties can access the data.
3. Featuring real-time data: Using WebSockets, we have thought of implementing and displaying real-time live data right from the time when the restaurants enter the data to the ResQ-uers info page.
4. Report Spam: If the portal users fail to justify their actions and if their points keep on reducing say to minus, we shall keep a feature to allow to report spam so that the user will be deactivated.
5. Collaboration with NGOs: We intend to collaborate with NGOs to increase the reach of our application and help whoever we can.

The above features, once incorporated and intertwined, can lead to a one-stop application that would consist of everything one can need when it comes to helping the needy and rescue them from the hell-demon of living, i.e hunger and starvation.

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