MealMatch

Inspiration

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are often unable to receive large donations from businesses due to the lack of storage facilities and resources. To help eliminate and meet the sustainable development goal of zero hunger, we created an application that pairs food drives with large donors that have expiring/excess food.

What it does

Businesses can enter information about their excess food inventory, days of inventory, and contact information. Next, NPOs will login and search our database for information on the donations they need. If they find a business with that item, they can contact them to pick it up.

To increase incentives for businesses to participate, MealMatch is free of charge. If an NPO doesn't pick up donations, they can continue to dispose of it as they typically would. It simply provides more resources and a solution to storage issues for food banks!

How we built it

For front-end, we used an online tool to create an interface that allows users to interact with our database. Additionally, we used figma for a mock-up of our web application.

For back-end, we used VS Code to create the JavaScript files in the MERN stack for the database. We used Insomnia to test the API and make sure data is able to be inputted correctly.

Challenges we ran into

Since this was the first hackathon for two of our team members and the second hackathon for our third member, we had to learn various coding languages within the span of one day, as well as how to operate new IDE's and online tools.

We were tasked with learning a handful of new material, which included watching various tutorial and boot camp videos on languages such as javascript, as well as how to operate online tools such as figma, react.js, vscode, mongo, and more.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some accomplishments that we are proud of include learning all about front-end and back-end development, as well as how to connect the two to make a web application. We are also proud of the creation of our figma.

The main accomplishment would be completing what we set out to do despite not knowing any of the skills that were required for the project at the start of the day. For example, we were tasked with learning javascript, how to operate new IDE's, as well as how to use coding tools such as figma.

What we learned

All of us learned new front-end and back-end coding strategies required for making a web application. We were able to add new languages and strategies into our toolkit, and we hope that all of these acquired skills will come in handy for future hackathons (hopefully many!)

What's next for MealMatch

In the future, MealMatch looks to develop a website, as well as expand into mobile applications. We hope that we can utilize omni-channel marketing to make MealMatch as accessible as possible.

Built With

• express.js
• figma
• insomnia
• javascript
• mongodb
• node.js
• retool
• terminal