FoodForDayz

Inspiration

Food is life. The story goes that the world produces enough food to feed every single person on Earth but there is still a billion people in the world experiencing starvation or malnutrition. Where did the extra food go? Most of them are actually wasted in developed countries. Managing leftovers have always been a challenge due to the high food safety standards imposed and the problem of location mismatch between the people who need the food and where the leftovers are. We are here to change that by offering a different approach to it by highlighting the demand of the food to the people who prepare it. But before we change the world, we want to change Duke's campus first.

What it does

FoodForDayz is a demand-management app that allows students to notify the college canteen if they do not plan to dine in the college canteen. A lot of food is wasted by marketplace every day simply because they cannot anticipate how many students plan to eat there and marketplace always end up cooking too much food. We want to create an app that will eventually be integrated with DukeMobile that allows students to indicate to marketplace in advance that they might not be going to eat at marketplace on certain days. In return, students will be offered some credits or FoodPoints that they can use to purchase food elsewhere on campus. From marketplace's perspective, they have a better idea on how much food to prepare for the day. From the user's perspective, they can get some money back for instances where they have to travel or dine out of campus.

How I built it

Our team utilized xCode to develop the app on the iOS platform first and we plan to expand it to Android at the later time.

Challenges I ran into

Importing the API into xCode took us a long time to figure out and just coding using xCode was tough since all of the members of our team were first time Hackathon participants and we had elementary levels of computer science knowledge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were excited to build our first iOS app, although it is not fully functional yet because of the limited time we have to code during HackDuke. We are also proud of our idea because there isn't such an app on the market or on any campuses yet and we believe that this can be a disruptive idea.

What I learned

We learned to work with fellow coders on idea synthesis, conceptualization of an app, physically building the app using xCode, seeking help from mentors and finally integrating our code to form the final product.