Lemon

Inspiration

Reducing food waste is one of the most effective ways to combat climate change. In fact, food waste has an environmental footprint 248x bigger than plastic! 🌍 As we researched the root causes of food waste, we discovered that some 1.2 billion tonnes of fruit and vegetables are discarded annually at farms before they ever reach the market. But why? In the U.S., over 50% of produce is thrown away because it’s considered "too ugly" to sell well — that’s about 60 million tons of perfectly edible food gone to waste. One of our team members has seen firsthand how healthy and edible produce gets discarded just because it doesn’t look perfect. This issue is REAL and needs to be addressed immediately.

What it does

To solve this problem, we built Lemon. 🍋🌱 Lemon is an app that connects farmers, businesses and individual customers to reduce food waste and fight climate change. By signing up as a customer, you can access discounted, surplus produce from local farmers that would otherwise go to waste. Lemon offers a fully transparent shopping experience; each product is listed with details about its source, and the user has full control over when and what products they buy, like traditional online grocery stores. Producers (farmers) can create listings for their surplus or "wonky" produce, allowing them to sell items that are perfectly good but not deemed aesthetically pleasing enough for traditional markets. Businesses can also shop for discounted produce like customers, but Lemon offers business accounts additional support by enabling them to request in bulk, advertise to nearby users and and form long-term partnerships with local farmers. Lemon’s goal is to raise awareness about the impact of food waste, making it easier for everyone to make sustainable shopping choices and contribute to a greener, more connected world.

Painpoints ❓Many consumers want to make sustainable choices but don’t know how. Lemon makes it easy by offering access to eco-friendly food at discounted prices. 🍏 Farmers with surplus & 'imperfect' produce get to sell their produce, creating a new source of income and increasing their positive impact on the environment. 👉 Businesses get to access locally-produced crops at much lower prices, search for and partner with producers and benefit from advertising perks, like sustainability spotlights on the app's main page that are shown to customers in their area.

Broader context Lemon’s focus on reducing food waste aligns with environmental regulations. The U.S. government has set a goal to cut food waste in half by 2030 through various initiatives and consumer education. Some states are even passing legislation to restrict the amount of food waste going to landfills. Lemon has strong word-of-mouth potential, driven by eco-conscious consumers as well as farmers who are profiting out of Lemon. We also incorporated share buttons in the app so that users can share information about this initiative with their friends.

Market & Impact With 60 million tons of wasted produce every year in the U.S., the opportunity for a sustainable solution is enormous. The demand for eco-friendly food options is growing rapidly.

Stakeholder Incentives Farmers: sell produce that would otherwise go to waste; a new source of income. Customers: get fresh, discounted produce; contribute to sustainability. Businesses: get fresh, discounted produce in bulk; get recognition for sustainability efforts.

How we built it

We implemented our vision for Lemon using Flutterflow. After drawing a lo-fi prototype, taking user experiences into account, we started familiarizing ourselves with Flutterflow and got to building. We used Supabase/PostgreSQL as our database and also added customized functions to our Flutter app. Using Flutterflow's sponsored special access plan, we were able to collaborate real-time on the app and distribute tasks between team members.

Challenges we ran into

Familiarizing ourselves with a completely new environment, Flutterflow, was challenging at first. This is the first hackathon experience of all team members, making the process extremely exciting but challenging at the same time. Some things on which we spent more time than we probably needed to were 🙃

• Setting up the database and user authentication
• Product listings
• Shopping cart

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are super proud of all the progress we made! Starting with only an interest in contributing to sustainability to landing on an idea to building it out with Flutterflow, we accomplished so much that we are proud to showcase.

What we learned

We are amazed to see how fast we were able to pick up how Flutterflow works and our ability to familiarize ourselves with a new tool showed us the importance of transferable skills, like logic. It also demonstrated that 'hackers' should be quick to adapt and fast learners.

What's next for Lemon

We are looking forward to getting feedback on our app, its design, and functionality. We hope to make iterations based on the feedback. We will have access to Flutterflow for two more months and who knows---maybe we'll even get to publish our app!

[NOTE: Only MOBILE view]

Built With

• dart
• flutter
• supabase