Free Chi Foods

Inspiration

Inspired by Free Water, a company that provides free water paid for by advertising on the bottles themselves, Free Chi Foods is a company that provides free food to the people of Chicago, paid for by ad space on food packaging!

What it does

We've built a platform capable of various things: First, it gives an easy intake for company information and advertising and options for specific locations within the city for their advertisements to be distributed; Next, it provides a similarly easy intake for catering and food companies that wish to partner with us, giving us information on what food they offer, allergens, and lead times for food; Finally, we have news and information on our front page on where and when our next free food drop is.

How we built it

After idea conception, we segmented our goal of free food into necessary rings to complete to ensure that the product is fully free to the end consumer, the people of Chicago! We've segmented our web page into a main page that shows food boxes and the time stamps, an advertising page where the intake for companies to put their information and payment, and a catering page where potential food partners can tell us their capacity issues. We've included necessary drop-downs and box fill ins for the firms to provide this information, and we've created detailed tier-based payment structure for companies.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges was determining costs of each and desirability for free food as an advertising venue. Particularly, non-partnered food catering for initial free offerings were estimated to be about $1000-1500, and custom packaging for advertised boxes also were fairly expensive in the range of $250-500. After adjusting tier pricing, we've determined that our revenue and cost-structure is sustainable for long-term growth.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the real-world application of this project; after brainstorming and creating some intro webpages for this idea, all four of us are convinced that we can and should create this platform and start pushing out free food out to the streets, especially in poorer areas to help with food deserts in Chicago. It provides companies with a unique way of promoting themselves, and an easy way to improve peoples' lives. We're proud of being able to support Chicago businesses, especially local businesses, and we're proud of committing to sustainability of using 100% recycled cardboard for boxes.

What we learned

We learned the challenges of developing a complex idea into a concrete platform ready for user use via Lovable. Changing specific wording and marketing tactics to better encapsulate our idea helped hone our curiosity. In doing research, we've learned about the food scarcity problem in Chicago and how devastating it is for poorer communities and we learned how competitive the advertising landscape is and how hard it can be for local businesses to gain exposure.

What's next for Food4Free

We plan on fully vetting our idea and development into a tangible webpage, then start contacting businesses and food catering about future sponsorship and partnership prospects!

Built With

• lovable