Introducing: IMPERFECT

Inspiration

While brainstorming ideas for this year's food hackathon, we got hungry. In getting apples from the fridge, we both tried to look for the prettiest one, and we were hit with the realization that the way that the apple looks does not have a difference on quality, nutrition, or taste. After this, we got to work, researching "imperfect" food organizations that already exist, until we finally arrived at our idea, specifically addressing our community and local grocery stores; rather than having a delivery service.

What it does

The goal of "Introducing IMPERFECT" is to make "ugly" food more known in our community, eventually reaching a point in which we can hold polls, surveys, etc. to convince our local supermarkets to begin accepting these ugly foods from farmers and production, creating an isle in each store dedicated to these imperfect foods at a discount. But before this happens, since through our research, we were able to see that some stores have already tried--and failed-- to do this, because people simply did not want to buy from these sections, we must introduce our community to this. To do this, we will be in contact with chefs and other well-known members of our community, holding monthly virtual cook-offs, featuring imperfect produce. Some chefs will be using imperfect produce, and others will be using "perfect" produce. At the end of the cook-off we will show the results, and demonstrate to the audience that whether the ugly or perfect produce was used, the result is the same! We will also have some of the chefs do video cooking tutorials, featuring and advertising imperfect produce in the process, and talking about how much these foods contribute too food loss and food waste in our country. Through these initiatives over time, we hope to convince our community that implementing an imperfect produce section in grocery stores is imminently necessary, convincing the stores to accept these foods, decreasing food loss in our community, and eventually, in the world.

How we built it

In order to come up with a solution, we kept a running list of possible solutions to food waste. We discussed possible ideas and eliminated the impractical solutions after educating ourselves through research and by watching the provided videos. We took shots of produce, both imperfect and perfect, to highlight that there’s really no difference between the two. Once we had all the shots we needed, all we had to do was compile the videos with the help of iMovie & Shotcut.

Challenges we ran into

The creation of our video was the most challenging aspect of our project. How could we represent our idea most effectively? What outline would our video follow? In the end, we worked together to create the perfect video that would work to spread awareness and information to our audience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of being able to not only arrive at an idea, but also making it a logical and coherent solution. Along with this we are very proud of the creation of our video, as it took a very long time and a lot of frustration! We were also able to learn a lot more about food waste, and how a variety of different factors contributes to this. Overall, this was an extremely eye-opening experience for the both of us, and we hope to continue to work on the mission of decreasing food waste in the future!

What we learned

Upon the creation of our video, we realized that our idea was even more plausible than we had originally thought. Implementing our strategy would effectively reduce food waste since it involves the community as a whole. Quick and easy to begin, we knew this was the immediate solution we needed to address the major ramifications food waste has caused to our environment and world.

What's next for Introducing: IMPERFECT

While our solution does not address all off the factors that lead to increased food waste, we hope that with this small step, we can encourage people to waste less food, and eventually expand our idea to further educate the population on food waste through videos, a website, social media, and more. Through our growth, while our main ideas include the selling and usage of imperfect foods, we hope to also eventually expand to acknowledging more factors of food waste, such as implementing compost bins in schools and creating competitions between classes for who can create the most compost, holding food drives, and more. Our overall goal of this initiative is more of a community effort, with a main and initial focus on imperfect foods.