MealMate

MealMate is an application that connects students with extra meal swipes to those in need, alleviating food insecurity and waste by providing easy connection in comfortable ways for both parties.

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Inspiration

According to a study done by Forbes in 2022, nearly 40% of US college students face food insecurity. It is a rather shocking number. Food insecurity on college campuses is now being called the invisible epidemic. As freshmen living on campus (who are required to be on university’s meal plans, which has a set number of meal swipes per week), we often see posts on platforms like Reddit and GroupMe by people who offer to share as well as request extra meal swipes without much follow up. We want to not only provide a better way for both parties to connect, but also to encourage students to participate in such activities.

What it does

MealMate is an app -

  1. Users (both sharers and requesters) sign up to the app to participate.
  2. Users get reminded at the beginning of each week to toggle a status, indicating if they have extra meal swipes to share or not that week. This status can be toggled at any time.
  3. The app’s home screen is a map of the dining halls and its number of sharers in real time, based on if the sharers have entered the dining hall locations (location data).
  4. Requesters can then click on the dining hall and the app will randomly pick a sharer at that dining hall, notify them there’s a request. The selected sharer can then accept the request and meet the requester at the entrance of the dining hall.
  5. The matching/connection process is automatic, and kept anonymous until the meeting (after the connection is made).

How we built it

We brainstormed possible UX choices to ensure the easiest (most frictionless) way for both sharers’ and requesters' journey. We used figma to mock up the UX pretty quickly. We began to build the app using React and a backend database, but ended up running into a few challenges and weren’t able to get a full running demo.

Challenges we ran into

  1. React - we’ve heard alot about React and wanted to incorporate it into our project. Following the tutorials we ran into package installation issues on our machine, and spent most of the time searching for solutions. Unfortunately we weren’t able to find a solution in time for coding the web app.
  2. Google API - We planned on hosting the webapp on google cloud and using google maps API and were able to setup services and an app project, but were not able to get the credentials working, partly due to our issues with installing React

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We used design thinking methodology to brainstorm the UX design. Proud of the UX solution we came up with in order to make both the sharer and the requester experience frictionless. We are really looking forward to testing our prototype.

What we learned

  1. Don’t miss the workshops that can help with rapid prototyping. We could have tried out some of the new tools offered instead of learning React.
  2. Get better at rapid prototyping by thinking through what’s required minimally and what can be “fake” to demonstrate the key idea. Worry about certain implementation details later.

What's next for MealMate

  1. Build the app prototype
  2. Get the word out on campus and get adoption
  3. Test, gather feedback, improve
  4. We believe it can be expanded into a generalized match/connection app with more usage scenarios for finding people to do activities with - such as study groups, clubs, outings, rideshare, gym buddies…

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