ShelfLife

Inspiration

Food insecurity on college campuses is an invisible epidemic. About 30 to 50% of college students are food insecure about half of the time during their college careers, and about 10 to 20% of those drop out due to food insecurity issues. Although most colleges have some sort of student pantry, many are unaware of their existence or are too self-conscious to be seen needing food help. As a consequence, much of the food gets unclaimed and bad. On the other hand, Some of us on our team had the problem of buying too much food but having no one to give it to before it got bad. And we realized these problems aren't unique to us only. Therefore we thought of making a site and system that is safe, reliable, and contactless where food can be shared, hunger fought, and shame eradicated.

What it does

Our combination of hardware and software connects students with food excess that may be turned into food waste and students struggling with food insecurity. From there we provide a location for students to drop off and pick up the food anonymously to take away any shame that may be involved with either struggle.

How we built it

So far, we have built a mockup of the website on Figma, but not the web application yet.

Challenges we ran into

We could not build an entire web application in the time given.
It was hard to narrow down a reliable process but we did it.
Time management in balancing Technica's workshops with our project.
The business plan and logistics took up a lot of time and brain power.
The viewport on the demo has a different resolution to some people's laptops.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a mockup
No arguments in the team and the team was harmonious
The PowerPoint was awesome
We were able to do a project on social good

What we learned

We learned about the food epidemic across college campuses
We learned how to write a business plan
We learned about the financials of companies
we learned about non-profits
We learned about other food solutions being implemented across college campuses in the US

What's next for Shelf Life

In order to create the furthest reach to aid college students across the nation, we are looking to expand our product to not just starting here at UMD and the East Coast but all across the nation and eventually the world! Furthermore, in order to maintain user retention and to foster community, we are eagerly looking forward to gamification services. In which, users would be able to compete in challenges: cleaning out our fridges across campuses/giving away large amounts of food, etc. to compete against their peers and be entered into a quarterly raffle.