Inspiration
Since the UK-wide lockdown began in March 2020, child hunger has become even more of an issue than it once was. With children being sent home from school, poorer children lost access to a free meal at school, a meal that would now have to be sourced by their parents. Amongst other pressures that the lockdown brought (such as a surge in unemployment), many families struggled to meet this demand. The Free School Meals (FSM) scheme was extended on April 6th 2020 to support these children who, in normal times, were eligible for FSM, and following a influential campaign by Marcus Rashford, this support was extended further to provide meal vouchers for children in need during the holidays.
The first point of action for supermarkets with edible food surplus is to re-distribute it to local charities where it can then be accessed by those in need. However, food bank charities must still spend sizable amounts in order to meet the demand for food in some areas. We thought that if we could streamline the allocation of food for re-distribution, it might be possible to save money and free up funds so that local charities may invest in solving the underlying problems in the community that lead to hunger, rather than spending money on food to solve the hunger crisis superficially. By solving the root of these problems, we will have a more sustainable solution to hunger in the UK which will be more impactful for generations to come.
What it does
This graph solution provides a foundation for the efficient distribution of supermarket waste in the UK to combat child poverty. A user can choose a region and see the corresponding waste, child poverty rates and number of foodbanks present to illustrate if the waste could be distributed to combat child poverty and if there are existing resources in place to facilitate this distribution. The age group node further breaks down the data illustrating the number of Free School Meals provided per school stage to further direct distribution resources to target specific age groups.
How we built it
We have used the regions of the UK as the foundation for our solution connecting them to Foodbanks, Age groups and each of ‘The Big Four’ supermarkets in the UK. Each connecting edge contains regional specific data with the supermarket edges containing the number of stores in each region and their corresponding waste. The Foodbanks node contains the number of Foodbanks per region. Finally, the Age Group edge contains the Poverty rates and Free School Meals per school stage per region.
Having each edge connecting to the Region node allowed us to paint a full picture of each region facilitating subsequent analysis.
Challenges we ran into
The most significant challenge in this project was the struggle to find accurate food waste data as supermarkets generally did not provide a detailed breakdown of their waste. We began the project aiming to map out the regional waste of the top 10 supermarkets in the UK by market share. Although, to fill out the top 10 we had to do a number of estimations which hindered the accuracy of the project. Thus, we decided to just cover ‘The Big Four’ supermarkets breaking down their regional waste by the number of stores in each region. In a similar vein it was difficult to find the breakdown of Free School Meals per school stage for specific regions such as Northern Ireland and Wales. Although, as we had sufficient data for the rest of the regions, we could accurately estimate the breakdown of meals.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to make reasonable estimates for missing data which allowed us to create a much more usable model. These estimates really expanded the possible impact of the project, and demonstrate how our data insights can be put into practice. We made several attempts at designing our initial schema as we had to revise the design several times to make adjustments once we had tested the functionality of the graph. Our final schema design has led to a successful model and we are proud of the user-friendly and intuitive nature of our graph.
What we learned
Although much is being done to combat child hunger in the UK, we believe that our graph would significantly reduce the cost of providing food for those in need. We have studied the volume of food waste and deprivation rates in each region of the UK and discovered that if the re-distribution process were more streamlined then wasted food could be put to great use and there would be more than enough food to feed those in need.
What's next for Redistribution of Supermarket Waste to Combat Child Poverty
As our graph solution provides a foundation for the distribution of food waste to combat child poverty the opportunities to expand the graph to allow for more accurate analysis are significant.
For example, we have built some data to map out the coordinates of each supermarket in each region as well as the corresponding fuel price for that region. Thus, we can begin to estimate part of the distribution costs to help formulate a budget for efficiently distributing this waste.
The accuracy of the graph can be further enhanced through the cooperation of supermarkets in providing specific regional waste data. Furthermore, a breakdown of the nutritional values and ‘best before’ dates of the food waste will allow one to more efficiently plan the distribution of waste.
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