How did we get inspired?
Our biggest inspiration came from our newfound passion for circular economy. In our university, we used to notice that all the excess prepared food from cafeteria is being thrown directly to trash cans. We investigated the matter and found that around 40-50KGs of food was being thrown every day for only around 300 students who attend cafeteria on daily basis. We wanted to address this situation to have a green circular campus and now we endeavor to create zero food waste environments in organizations across the world.
Our solution for the problem?
We’ll provide a software to organizations and food departments which will update the food management department with estimated number of students attending the meals a few hour prior to the actual mealtime. This solution helps not only the mess to better manage the food, but also increases awareness amongst students.
How we built it
We started building this application 8 months ago. Taking continuous user feedback is helping us get more info about the overall user experience that our software provides to our users. We started working on Machine Learning models recently to provide our customers with proper analysis and trends. We were constantly being mentored by Renergii Asia, Singapore and JK Lakshmipat University, India. With their support we were able to transform our idea into a reality.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was the pandemic which kept pushing the testing of our application further. Another challenge was our small team which had great expertise in technical part but lacked knowledge about the business part. To overcome this issue, we took business model as our college minor and were able to build a good financial model to carry up.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were declared the proud winners of Circular Cities Asia, an Asia level innovation competition where universities from across Asia takes part and compete to provide best of the best solutions for environment related issues.
What we learned
We learned a bunch of crucial things, not only the technical stuff but also stuff related to business, finance and public speaking. The best was that we learnt how to make a business model which is not only financially stable but also helps in maintaining the circularity of the current product and services that we provide.
What's next for MarK
Next we plan to scale up our idea to as many universities as possible with our current business model. We all know how global warming is changing temperature these days, and hence we plan to connect NGOs and other Non profitable social organizations to university cafeteria's where tons of food is being wasted such that it can be distributed among the people who really need food and are starving on the streets in these hot and cold days.
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