Matcha

Food waste turned into great taste

Comment

A marketplace for restaurants to buy/sell materials that would otherwise be wasted.

DEMO

https://practical-yonath-a01f84.netlify.com username: team76@gmail.com Password: 2019

Inspiration

Food waste is a big problem in today’s world and especially North America. Sustainability & reversing the damage we’ve done to our planet is more pressing than ever, amidst ever increasing political turmoil that’s reversing many of the progressive initiatives and reforms that been taken to move forward in sustainability. Innovation in this space can’t be stopped however: there have been a plethora of apps and services that have come out that try to chip away at what seems incredibly daunting. Flashfood is an app that lets grocery stores let go of their excess inventory at a low price to customers. Content curation apps like Detox Me, Think Dirty and Good Guide seek to keep the consumer more informed about the everyday products in their lives and make better decisions. Good on You seeks to connect consumers to sustainable clothing establishments. All this is great. However, we noticed that the fundamental problem, of food wastage is still around. Subscription meal-prep services like GoodFood and HelloFresh create way less food wastage, but due to the expensive nature of the packaging and delivery process, the offset is questionable, nevertheless a step forward. How can restaurants, suppliers and grocery stores be incentivized to hold on to their excess or food at the end of the day that’s going to be thrown away, and exchange it with an entity that needs it?

What it does

Matcha matches entities such as restaurants, suppliers, grocery stores and charities to each other to facilitate food exchange.

Challenges we ran into

  • Interac API was a little finnicky.
  • TD API dataset not diverse enough.

What we learned

  • Even if you have a bunch of ideas coming into the Hackathon, it’s always best to prepare the elevator pitch and other branding material before hand so you can get right to prototyping.
  • Setting up a development environment specifically for Hackathons that gets you started on reusable essentials would be a big time saver. Setup took a chunk of time we could’ve spent on doing more logic.
  • Getting icons / colors and descriptions (content) sorted out before hand.

What's next for Matcha

This is just the start of this beautiful idea. Having an environment to bring together 6 beautifully talented people and get them to collaborate, argue and discuss ideas was such a blessing! We had such interesting discussion around a plethora of topics and we all brainstormed the heck out of this idea, freely criticizing it, till it reached a point of viability. This is just the start. We think this idea has great potential, and given a longer timeline, could be developed into something phenomenal and potentially have a far-reaching impact we could not have predicted.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates