Inspiration

Tackling Food Insecurity in Texas by incentivizing businesses

What it does

It connects restaurants that have excess food inventory and with local homeless shelters nearby. When restaurants enter the market value and cost of raw materials for their donations (this is generally kept in track of anyway to monitor profit margins), they are notified of their potential tax deductible.

How we built it

XCode, Nodejs, Firebase, JavaScript, Swift

Challenges we ran into

Nodejs Frustrations, Cloud Firebase Beta is not optimized for Swift, Billing was not enabled (lost two hours of time)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working app that’s powered by a cloud backend. Fully working microservice behind application. Developed formula to calculate tax deductible for business after reading through IRS documents. Developed verification system based off of publicly available IRS data that recognized legitimate charitable organizations for the purpose of tax deductions.

What we learned

The large scope of food insecurity in Texas (and America more broadly) despite us being a highly developed society.

What's next for Food Samaritan

Building a sophisticated cross-verification system between shelter administrators and restaurant managers. More research into the legal implications of donating food inventory.