hōfu- connecting food providers to food pantries

With 80 million pounds of food being wasted every year in America alone, our purpose is to give food new life by providing a platform to send food to those suffering from food insecurity.

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Inspiration

80 million pounds of food per year go to waste in America alone. Counter that with the 38 million Americans that suffer from food insecurity every year. How can America be wasting so much food, yet not be able to feed its own people?

What it does

hofu is designed to be a safe and secure way for food providers (such as grocery stores, restaurants, and farms) to connect with and give "less desirable" food to food pantries. This way, that perfectly healthy and edible food is not tossed and wasted, but is instead used to feed those that need food.

hofu hits 3 metaphorical birds with one stone:

  • reducing food waste, reducing resource waste and slowing climate change
  • feeding the hungry, helping food-insecure families in America
  • bringing the community together by connecting local organizations

How we built it

We built it using raw HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We also made calls to a google maps api to display a map on one of our pages.

Challenges we ran into

We had issues with implementing the google maps api onto our web page because none of us had much experience with making api calls. We also had to implement a lot of input fields with javascript which we also had never done before. We also had issues with formatting the elements in our page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud getting the google maps api to work because we went into it without any prior knowledge, and it took a lot of googling to figure out how to do it. Furthermore, we are proud of our ability to learn and produce code that we knew nothing about before.

What we learned

We learn how to use Javascript to implement api calls and to dynamically update our webpage based on forms, and we learned some new CSS techniques to improve the formatting of the web pages.

What's next for hofu - connecting food providers to food pantries

Next, we hope to use database software like Firebase using Django to allow the map to store different food provider locations to help food searchers find food near their current location. We also hope to improve the overall responsiveness and accessibility of our website.

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