FoodSaver

First screen: choose which meal to preorder
Second screen: choose pickup time slot
Third screen: confim and pay with camipro to reserve meal

Inspiration

A discussion with the BC cafeteria's cooks, in which we learned about their way of ordering and preparing ingredients, and of the potential for reducing waste if there was less uncertainty regarding how many people would show up for lunch
Super long queues at campus cafeterias and food trucks, especially around peak hours
Restaurants which have this feature but not that many in Switzerland for now sadly

What it does

Students and staff can book their meal at a cafeteria up to 1 day in advance, picking a specific time slot. This way they get to queue less while the cafeteria owners can have an easier time planning quantities and thus reduce waste. This feature could easily be added in the Pocket Campus app.

How we built it

Most of our work was in discussing among ourselves to find a problem on campus which might be solved. We also interviewed BC cafeteria's cooks to get their insight. Once we had the idea down, we made a prototype in the form of an Android app. Since it is very useful to have images of the food when preordering online, we also generated images for the food using stable diffusion.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the right balance between something which can be implemented in practice and something which could truly make a difference.
Making a prototype which would then be easy to integrate into Pocket Campus app and flow well with great user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing a solution for a real problem, which we can start experimenting with at a small scale and then has a lot of potential to scale to other cafeterias/campuses/restaurants, around the globe we wish ;)
Integrating the stable diffusion food image generation to solve the problem of users needing to see the food before actually preordering it

What we learned

A bit of design thinking, which was completely new to us, thanks to the workshop!
Going step by step through the process of discussing w/ stakeholders (cooks, students) -> brainstorming -> planning -> prototyping and then going back and forth to refine our idea
HuggingFace library

What's next for FoodSaver

First of all we need to discuss with many cafeterias on campus to see how much impact our idea could have on reducing their waste (sadly it was the weekend so cafeterias were closed :( ). Then if we see there is potential, we are really motivated and would love to discuss with PocketCampus dev team and other stakeholders to make this a reality!! We also have several other related idea for features to reduce food waste, such as adding a way for students to pickup leftover food at the end of day, perhaps for free or at reduced price!