Re-Fresh

31 billion dollars worth of food waste occurs in Canada every single year. Re-fresh aims to step in and provide low-cost meals to consumers while saving the planet at the same time.

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Inspiration

With billions of tons of food waste occurring in Canada every year. We knew that there needs to exist a cost-effective way to reduce food waste that can empower restaurant owners to make more eco-conscious decisions while also incentivizing consumers to choose more environmentally-friendly food options.

What it does

Re-fresh is a two-pronged system that allows users to search for food from restaurants that would otherwise go to waste at a lower price than normal. On the restaurant side, we provide a platform to track and analyze inventory in a way that allows restaurants to better manage their requisitions for produce so that they do not generate any extra waste and they can ensure profits are not being thrown away.

How we built it

For the backend portion of the app, we utilized cockroachDB in python and javascript as well as React Native for the user mobile app and the enterprise web application. To ensure maximum protection of our user data, we used SHA256 encryption to encrypt sensitive user information such as usernames and password.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the lack of adequate documentation as well as a plethora of integration issues with react.js and node, cockroachDB was a difficult framework to work with. Other issues we ran into were some problems on the frontend with utilizing chart.js for displaying graphical representations of enterprise data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the end design of our mobile app and web application. Our team are not native web developers so it was a unique experience stepping out of our comfort zone and getting to try new frameworks and overall we are happy with what we learned as well as how we were able to utilize our brand understanding of programming principles to create this project.

What we learned

We learned more about web development than what we knew before. We also learned that despite the design-oriented nature of frontend development there are many technical hurdles to go through when creating a full stack application and that there is a wide array of different frameworks and APIs that are useful in developing web applications.

What's next for Re-Fresh

The next step for Re-Fresh is restructuring the backend architecture to allow ease of scalability for future development as well as hopefully being able to publish it and attract a customer-base.

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