Zero Waste Orders

Inspiration

In the United States, 492 to 1,032 pounds of food per person are thrown out each year. The majority of this waste is sent to landfills where high levels of methane gas are emitted during its decomposition. These levels of greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to the emissions of 42 Coal Powered Plants per year. In 2019 in the U.S., 66 million tons of wasted food was generated at the consumer and retail levels. This includes restaurants, grocery stores and food delivery systems. Restaurants make up 15% of all food waste in landfills.

Among the multiple stages in the food consumption process that contribute significantly to food waste, one notable area is the consumer level. Unfortunately, within this stage, a clear issue arises due to its high wastage, despite the presence of straightforward remedies. Our app targets to reduce waste within restaurants at the preparation stage by ensuring that over-ordering does not occur and tracking food waste. Currently, the standard is that the quantity of food ordered in restaurants is done by chefs and owners relying on instinct instead of data-driven analysis. However, when restaurants implement data-driven analysis that analyses ordering practices, customer data and inventory the focus is on reducing the cost of inventory and labour while increasing efficiency. Even if these practices lead to over-ordering and closer expiration dates of products. While our application does not ignore the economic realities of running a restaurant, the primary focus is to reduce food waste.

What it does

This app initially prompts the user to input recipes, ingredient cost and shelf life, initial inventory, and order history. This creates the foundation necessary to predict what the user should order from its suppliers in the form of a grocery list. Daily, the restaurant owner must validate the inventory and input what dishes were made. This allows the app to update the digital inventory and predict what should be added to the following grocery list. Although we were unable to implement KPIs and displays to show what food is expected to expire, we want to highlight that this app has the necessary structure and information to produce such outputs with a little more development time.

How we built it

We performed a use case analysis to identify the main goals we could come up with for the solution. This led us to a functional breakdown to identify how we would implement the solution. We decided on Python for the backend and tkinter for the front-end. We then stepped away for the day and returned bright and early the next day. We spent the day coding the different functions and storyboarding what we wanted the user to see. We also performed some market research and identified our niche which ended up lining up well with our concepts at this stage. Along the way, we identified edge cases which we either included or dismissed for the MVP. On the last day, we debugged and finished integrating the front-end and back-end to create a seamless user experience. We ended our contribution by writing out this post, creating our presentation, and filming our demo.

Challenges we ran into

Due to time constraints of our team members, we were only able to dedicate 3 days to scope, design and implement our application. We gave ourselves one day to scope and plan our application and two days to implement it. Furthermore, as a team, we have never worked together before in a professional capacity. We had to adapt to each other’s working styles and methods quickly. Additionally, this was everyone’s first hackathon. We had to adjust our individual backgrounds in design and systems engineering to what works best for a hackathon. Finally, while we all have experience in software development and environmental policy these areas are none of our specialties. We were constrained to using Python as our primary coding language as this was the only language all of us were familiar with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We tackled this hackathon in 3x 8h workdays and are happy about all the firsts we tackled together. It was everyone's first time in a hackathon, first time designing an app in Python, and first time exploring the context of restaurant management.

What we learned

In the context of this hackathon, we learned about app development, python coding, and the challenges that restaurants face. Most importantly, we grew as a team and as individuals both taking away technical skills and observations related to our professional strengths and weaknesses.

What's next for Zero Waste Orders

Whether that is as a team or as individuals, we look forward to applying what we learned in 3 short days to hack away at new problems. We will be back in the hackathon scene!

Built With

• jupyter
• notebook
• tkinter