Carpe Diem

Nourish all today!

Inspiration

Migrant workers in Singapore are unsung heroes. They have played a critical role in building our beautiful nation, yet, these workers continue to be unfairly treated. Amongst other things, they lack consistent access to fresh and nutritious food, leaving some malnourished. Understanding this, we immediately recalled the irony of our food waste issue in Singapore.

While these workers lack access to nutritious foods, Singaporeans have developed a habit to throw away perfectly fresh and edible foods when the produce was “ugly” when they were unable to finish their food.

To simultaneously tackle both problems, we have created Nourish.

Nourish is a web application that makes volunteering easier by providing an alternative, more convenient means of volunteering. Instead of volunteering their time, which Singaporeans typically lack, or contributing through monetary means, Nourish allows Singaporeans to donate their extra food. This would cut down the amount of food waste generated while also giving migrant workers greater access to nutritious meals.

What it does

Nourish capitalises on technology to streamline the volunteering scene in the migrant worker community in Singapore. Essentially, Nourish serves two stakeholders, the donors and the receivers - migrant workers staying at dormitories - to address the complementary issues of food wastage and lack of nutrition amongst migrant workers in Singapore.

Recognising that Singaporeans lack the time to volunteer, Nourish allows for volunteering on the go. For the donors, by simply filling in a form on Nourish indicating the type of food, allergenic ingredients, expiry date, a brief description, and attaching a picture of the food item to be donated, this data will be uploaded to our database which will be reflected on the receiver's end of the Nourish.

This provides receivers with a comprehensive overview of the food available in refrigerators placed in the eight dormitories. By selecting dormitories across Singapore, donors can easily drop their food off at the nearest dormitory, increasing accessibility and simplifying the volunteering process.

When scrolling through the food available for collection, filters are available to better cater to migrant workers with allergies and dietary restrictions namely halal, vegetarian, and vegan.

Beyond individuals in Singapore, Food and Beverage (F&B) merchants who tend to have significant amounts of food wastage, can easily donate their excess food to migrant workers with a demand for affordable and healthy food.

As we build a strong footing, more refrigerators can be placed in more dormitories in the future to serve a greater population of migrant workers who are deprived of affordable and healthy nutrition options.

How we built it

To translate our concept of Nourish into reality, we used JavaScript to design the user interface while using a python flask for the back-end of the web application. To showcase the functionality of the app, we created a database using SQlite and this data can be collected, filtered and shown to users accurately according to the foreign workers’ dietary requirements and location. As utilising SQLite and running on a local server was still a fairly new experience for us, it was incredibly fulfilling to have been able to create a well-functioning web application with these components. While the web application is currently built on a local server, we hope to bring Nourish to a server which allows many donors and foreign workers to interact with the web application simultaneously.

Challenges we ran into

We felt the immense pressure of the time constraint. This meant that we had to manage our expectations and also divert most of our attention to the part of the project that mattered the most; a functioning web app. We could not include all the functions that we initially wanted to have as it was not possible, considering the time constraint. However, we envision that in the future, we can include these functions to increase the range and target groups of the web app.

Beyond the time constraint, we also encountered numerous bugs when we ran the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From brainstorming ideas to make volunteering easier, more widespread and more beneficial for migrant workers to creating a web application for the first time, we pushed our limits and tried something new! We worked as a team to produce this end product and that is an accomplishment we are proud of.

What we learned

The hackathon provided us with a platform to improve our prior knowledge of coding and learn new languages and coding methods.

We also realised that this knowledge of programming can be put to good use and can be used to give back to our society through the creation of such applications.

What's next for Nourish.

We aim to expand our target group to restaurants and supermarkets as well in the future. Restaurants produce a higher amount of food waste daily, especially buffets in restaurants.

Furthermore, supermarkets throw away packaged food as the expiry date might be approaching soon. They also throw out food items like vegetables and fruits that do not look like what it is “supposed” to.

Such food products are still fresh and nutritious. Throwing them away is completely unnecessary and hence, we want to salvage them.

Additionally, collaborating with such restaurants and supermarkets will also provide them and their staff with an opportunity for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Hence, we envision our web app targeting more donors in the future.