Food Redemption

Hello! We are Food Redemption! We chose to tackle the issue of food insecurity and wastage with our website by creating a platform where food distributors can donate excess food to people in need.

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Inspiration

Every year one out of eight Americans experience food insecurity. This problem persists for college students, with 38% of students struggling to put food on the table. Looking at these statistics, it may seem as though there is a food shortage, but it’s actually just the opposite: America has a large food waste problem. Actually, restaurants end up disposing of 85% of their unused food. That’s 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year. Regardless of the excess food, people still go hungry while waste and garbage piles up. We at Food Redemption hope to bridge this gap by taking on the challenge of combating food insecurity and wastage. How do we plan to do this? By allowing restaurants to donate their excess food! Giving people access to food, and allowing restaurants to lower their overall waste.

What it does

This web application allows local restaurant owners and food distributors in Davis the opportunity to list their meals at the end of the day that were not eaten and would have to be thrown out otherwise. These meal posts then become visible to those in need around Davis. The receivers can view the options and claim a meal for the day! Both the distributors and receivers have access codes provided to them, giving them access to this platform. These access codes prevent the distribution of food from unsafe vendors, and ensure that this platform primarily remains a resource to those in need. In addition, to keep the meals from being claimed by one user, each user can claim one meal each day. We hope to reach as many people as possible with our software, and designed Food Redemption with this caveat in mind.

How we built it

Initially, we prototyped our application with Figma and designed all the logos on Procreate. Then, we utilized React.js, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for our front-end development. React.js is one of the most popular framework in the industry, and we would like to incorporate it into our application. Finally, we stored all of the user's data in Google Cloud Firestore, leveraging the scalability and reliability of cloud services.

Challenges we ran into

Our team knew from the start that we wanted to create something that would help those suffering from food insecurity but also recognize that there are already organizations in our area, such as the ASUCD Pantry and the Yolo Food Bank that tackle this issue. We were stuck on this issue of how to create a project that can differentiate ourselves from such programs, but resolved this by involving local restaurants in Davis. So not only does this web application address food insecurity, but it also tackles issues surrounding food waste and sustainability. In addition, we struggled to complete all the tasks we ideally wanted within our website. We wanted to implement email confirmation to the receiver, as well as having a way for users to report bad food. We had to prioritize tasks that are essential to the operational ability of our software.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our ability to create a clear, fully interactive web application that will be able to serve our community for the better. All of the technologies in this application are relatively new to us, and we're very happy to use this opportunity to learn beneficial skills that we can use in the future.

What we learned

The majority of our team members have not had experience participating in a Hackathon before, so having this opportunity allowed us to learn about the entire process of creating a web application from start to finish. This spanned from designing with Figma and HTML as well as programming in JavaScript.

What's next for Food Redemption

In the future, we would like to increase the functionality of our platform by emailing confirmation receipts after claiming a meal, and creating a way for users to report bad food. In addition, we would like to expand our efforts to the greater Sacramento area so that we can provide more people with secure meals and also allow more restaurants the opportunity to donate their food without it having to go to waste.

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