GreenSlug

Connect farmers with businesses and NPOs in Santa Cruz to sell surplus crops. Results in a efficient food waste solution to sell produce that uplifts the local community.

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Inspiration

Santa Cruz is known for it's strong biodiverse and agriculturally rich ecosystem, but lots of fresh produce goes to waste each years (40% in California). This leads to excessive food waste and pricing issues for farms and consumers (UCSC students and locals). GreenSlug was created because of this issue, since we can use technology bridge communities, uplifting Santa Cruz.

What it does

GreenSlug is the go-to platform for farmers seeking to sell their produce overflow. It allows farms to list their harvested crops that aren't suitable for grocery stores (often due to shape), and gives consumers a chance to support these farms. The consumers are businesses (restaurants, kitchens, etc.) and NPOs (non-profit organizations) who can bargain for the crops at a reduced price. The software facilitates these transactions by streamlining the process of listing and purchasing, with automated login and purchase authentication.

How we built it (Tech Stack)

We built GreenSlug as a full-stack web application, using Next.js and Tailwind CSS for the frontend, Auth0 for the passwordless authentication, Typescript for the backend logic, MongoDB Atlas on AWS Cloud for the database and the website is deployed locally.

Challenges we ran into

The main issue we faced was the file structure for the application, since we were used to the traditional HTML/CSS/JS website development for the Flask/Django, but not for Next.js and Typescript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned completely new languages and frameworks we didn't know before. While we knew Python, HTML, SQLite and how to use a terminal. We didn't know Typescript, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS, etc. And we learned it all in 36 hours.

What we learned

The important of parallel collaboration. We didn't have a live coding editor, so everyone had to branch the Github repository and develop their features separately. Understanding how the different aspects of a product come together, from the database to the UI/UX design, was essential to the success of our team.

What's next for GreenSlug

We intend to reach out to local restaurants and kitchens to identify our customer base. Additionally, we would like to integrate Google Maps without web application to show consumers where their produce is being sourced from. We also intend to utilize QR codes to verify delivery of the produce, facilitating the conversations between parties, along with deploying our site on Vercel.

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