FoodFinder

Matching hungry students with catered leftovers.

Comment

Inspiration

Northwestern faces an interesting paradox. Its numerous catered events produce copious amounts of leftovers. At the same time, campus is flush with hungry students who would pounce at the chance for free pizza, sandwiches, beverages, or any other caloric consumable. The disconnect between opportunity and population has created a number of common situations: event organizers asking attendees to take double or triple portion leftovers home, unread department emails that leave food cold for hours, and the worst case, food waste.

So we asked ourselves: how might we fill up the stomachs of hungry students with the scattered food opportunities around campus? And FoodFinder was born.

What it does

At a high level, FoodFinder publicizes the location of catered leftovers. By creating a public bulletin, our aim is for fresh food to find hungry students faster.

For this, FoodFinder has two main features: a home page displaying a collection of community posts, and a form to create a new post. On the home page, users navigate a list of photos and venue details sorted by post time. On the post creation page, users upload an image of the venue and specify what and where the food is.

How we built it

We built FoodFinder using React Native and deployed it using Expo.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team members had any experience creating mobile applications. Learning and applying React Native to build our idea in less than 24 hours was a challenge. Along the way, we ran into numerous roadblocks, among them package incompatibilities with our Apple M1 chips and frustratingly buggy tutorials.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re most proud of our progress with React Native. In less than 3 hours, we went from knowing nothing to grasping enough of the basics to prototype our app’s main pages. In the remaining time, we figured out how to implement features like photo upload and page navigation by cobbling tutorials together and ironing out errors. In the beginning, we were nervous about choosing to build a project with technology that we had zero experience in, but we’re proud that we stuck to it and learned a ton along the way.

What we learned

Technologies we learned during the course of the hackathon were React Native, JavaScript, Expo, and Firebase.

What's next for FoodFinder

Given more time, features we’d like to implement include:

  • the option to use the phone’s camera to be able to take pictures of food within the app instead of only being able to upload photos from the camera library.
  • a comments section for each post so users would be able to indicate whether the food was still available or not.
  • the ability for posts to be created with several pictures, rather than just one, arranged in a slideshow-esque format.
Share this project:

Updates