FoodShare

Inspiration

Our group found that nowadays many people are affected by food insecurity for reasons like: poverty, lack of employment, and unhealthy or innutritious food. Another issue that we glanced upon was the great amount of wasted food that come from restaurants. Since restaurants usually throw out food due to small imperfections, we believed that people affected by food insecurities could potentially consume restaurants' leftover food without any costs. For that reason, we decided to come up with a way to combat food waste and insecurity simultaneously by creating an app that helps connect the two together while including incentives for both the restaurant and users.

What it does

FoodShare is a mobile app that allows people with food insecurities to have another option to safely find food for themselves for free, while providing restaurants a way to donate their food rather than wasting it. Restaurants can use the app to post ads about their food and their incentive is that they gain money every time they donate their left-over food. Users can use FoodShare to search for food they want to eat by navigating through restaurants and pictures of appealing food.

How we built it

Our group utilized Dart for the back-end, Flutter for the front-end, and Android Studio + Visual Studio Code to test the app.

Challenges we ran into

At the start of this hackathon, none of us had experience coding in Dart, using Flutter, operate Android Studio, or create a mobile app in general. As a result, a fair amount of time was spent on learning the usage of these coding tools reducing our time towards coding, designing, and adding certain features. We decided to focus more on the front-end side of FoodShare, since our group was in a tight time constraint.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating and designing an application with a clean interface that fulfills our expectations, while learning a new language; UI software; and implementing it all into a new IDE.

What we learned

We learned many new skills including Dart, Flutter, and Android Studio.

What's next for FoodShare

In the future, we plan to further develop the back-end code, personalize the app more by improving the front-end design, and adding new features. Some of the many features include:

A google maps implementation to find nearby restaurants from a certain location
A feature to arrange restaurant ads based on customized tags of the type of certain cuisine, time posted, and alphabetical ordering of the name of food
The option to favourite preferred restaurants so that users can receive notifications for the status of food donations for a restaurant
An option to request delivery to home for a small fee