Pantry Patrol

Pantry Patrol is a versatile app that simplifies the daily operations of food pantries, with a special emphasis on tracking, monitoring, and eliminating food wastage in collaboration with food banks.

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Inspiration

As high school students, we have experienced the problem of food insecurity firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of our schoolmates who depend on subsidized or free meals in the school cafeteria no longer have access to meals provided at schools with school closures. As we started to research food insecurity, we learned about the scope of the food waste issue at the national level. While many people are going hungry, we are also throwing away a lot of food that people in need could have consumed. Wasted food is a problem because it impacts the economy, our society, and the environment. Reducing food losses by only 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans each year. Wasted food is a massive tax on the environment and contributes to greenhouse gases. The solution to this problem is reducing the amount of wasted food, depicted as source reduction at the top of the EPA Food Recovery Hierarchy.

What it does

After having conversations with the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina and food pantries pantries in our area, we built PANTRY PATROL, an application that helps food pantries track, monitor, and identify sources of food waste. We wanted to ensure that we created an application that meets food pantries’ needs, is affordable, and is simple and easy to use. For a more in-depth description of our journey, please refer to Our_Journey.pdf attached in the zip folder submission.

How we built it

We built our application PANTRY PATROL using AppSheets platform. We chose AppSheets as the target platform for several reasons:

  • It provides a convenient way to build cross-platform applications that can run on mobile phones, tablets, and PCs.
  • t provides a convenient way to model data using simple schemas from Google Sheets as a backing store without setting up databases.
  • It provides a way to build production-grade applications. Our team already has experience building applications using the platform.
  • It provides powerful widgets for taking pictures, collecting signatures, creating maps based on geographic data, etc., in a relatively intuitive and straightforward manner.
  • It provides a cost effective way of hosting and running applications for non-profit organizations.

For a complete description of the use cases, the entity model and user interface design with screenshots, please refer to the document titled Application_design.pdf inside the zip file attachment.

Challenges we ran into

The COVID-19 situation impeded our ability to collaborate in person. It would have been a lot more fun to meet in-person as we are developing and testing various use cases.

Finding time that worked for everyone was a big challenge. The three of us have been close friends since the beginning of middle school. We are all freshmen at Enloe Magnet high school, Raleigh, and participate in various school clubs together, including Science Olympiad and Speech and Debate. Our collective passion for STEM and love for doing team projects is what brought us together. We also had limited time on our hands with everything else going on, so that has been an ongoing challenge.

The food pantry workers on the front lines are generally not expected to have deep technical skills, so we ran into challenges with them onboarding the application. We are also made aware of the importance of making the application intuitive and easy to use.

We did learn a number of things about how to build portable mobile applications using AppSheets platforms. We ran into issues related to data integrity, boundary conditions, and various bugs as we developed the application. We used iterative development methods to develop features in small increments, reviewed the features periodically with the stakeholders to ensure the application satisfied the use cases we are set out to achieve. It was a great experience for all of us learning about how applications are built for mobile platforms.

Accomplishments we are proud of

We believe that our application will be tremendously useful to small and medium-sized food pantries to streamline their operations and stretch their resources to better help communities by avoiding food wastage. We would like to present our stakeholder feedback as evidence to demonstrate the benefits to the community. The complete letters are available in the Testimonials folder inside the zip file submission.

“As First Lady, I meet and work with food banks across North Carolina, and I believe the app Pantry Patrol will help bridge a communication gap and transition food tracking to the digital era. The app itself is skillfully designed to be user-friendly while containing beneficial information and statistics. Food insecurity and food wastage are significant problems in our community, and this app will help food pantries identify and eliminate sources of wastage.” - Ms. Kristin Cooper, First Lady of the State of North Carolina

“Siddharth Maruvada, Abhinav Meduri and Arnav Meduri, who all make up The Pantry Patrol. conceived of the idea to work with food pantries, in our service area, to develop a user- friendly app to track and, monitor, and reduce food wastage at food pantries, with the goal of ultimately reducing the overall waste, thus increasing the amount of consumable product to clients and their families."

"Outside of the benefits of the final goal, the team has been very conscious of the audience and has worked to create a solution that meets the needs of the Food Bank, with regards to data, and meets the included pantries with regard to their skill base, resources and schedules.” - Mr. Gideon Adams, Vice President of Community Health & Engagement Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina

“While I was skeptical at first about what a team of rising ninth graders could possibly do to address food insecurity, I have been extremely impressed by their passion for the issue, their creative approach in addressing it, their responsiveness to feedback, their initiative in tackling a difficult problem, and ultimately the utility of their final product!”

“I’m so pleased with the work of the Pantry Patrol. These students demonstrated tremendous insight and thoughtfulness in reaching out to community partners and organizations to really understand the underlying issues. In good entrepreneurial fashion, they **pivoted* as needed as they gained more information from their conversation with people who have boots on the ground. The skills they have gained will likely serve them and their community very well in the future!”* - Dr. Alice Ammerman DrPH, Director, Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Mildred Kaufman Distinguished Professor, Department of Nutrition Gillings School of Global Public Health and School of Medicine

“The application has built-in analytics and dashboards with comprehensive graphs, charts, and tables to display food waste by date, category, and reason. These features enable food pantries to review this data and look back at the improvements that can be made in their daily operations.”

“Cary has a rich history of supporting grassroots initiatives that include the quality of life for all our citizens, like the one that is summarized above. These students presented their material in a very professional way, and their project is well-researched so that it can be easily implemented in our community. I know they will represent Cary well and will have success in future endeavors.” - Mr. Harold Weinbrecht Jr., Mayor, Town of Cary, North Carolina

“I wanted to take a moment to congratulate you on a job well done. You are to be applauded for your awareness of hunger in our communities and your desire to help food pantries ensure that food is not wasted. While many may be well intentioned to help reduce hunger and waste, you set out on a mission to help answer this problem by using technology to record this type of data. You developed an app that can assist food pantries in learning what practices they can implement to better serve their communities. In addition, the data would also provide a way to observe patterns over time and solve underlying problems."

"During our brainstorming meetings, I felt that you all were genuinely interested in our ideas and suggestions, and you showed this by making adjustments to the app prior to the next meeting. Your questions throughout the process made it clear that you had done your research on food pantry operations and food wastage.” - Angie Nesius, Records and Data Collection Coordinator, FBCENC

What we learned

During our journey, we learned quite a bit about food pantries and their technological insights which influenced how we developed our application. For instance, we learned that food pantries cannot afford IT systems, despite having a need for one. Food pantries process large amounts of information and some form of technological solution would be extremely useful to them, however they cannot afford them. This made us realize that the solution we develop must be cost effective. Furthermore, we learned that food pantries are not very technologically savvy, and learning how to use an application would be difficult and time consuming if the user interface was not well designed. This made us come to the conclusion that our app must have an easy to use and user-friendly interface. For more in-depth discussion, please refer to Our_journey.pdf in the zip file submission.

What's next for Pantry Patrol

When we first started this project, our goal was to identify and work on a community problem. Throughout our journey, we were able to conduct research, talk to experts, and go on various field trips to learn more about the issues of food waste and food insecurity in our community. These experiences have shaped how we look at the food waste and food insecurity problems in America, and we are very passionate about helping to make a difference. We are passionate about making a difference in our community, and we plan to continue our project after the completion of the competition. We are currently piloting our app with two food pantries in NC:

In the future, we plan on gathering and analyzing important food waste data to share with food banks. We plan on obtaining their feedback for further growth and improvement of PANTRY PATROL. We also plan on partnering with more food banks and pantries in our area to improve their management systems with an underlying goal of reducing food wastage. By reaching out to more pantries in our vicinity, we will be able to help food pantries in maximizing their outreach. We have several other plans to expand this project and look into developing a suite of apps oriented towards tracking food wastage beyond food banks and pantries.

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