Smart Orders

Inspiration

The last two years as college students, we have noticed how much food is wasted at events. After looking more into food waste across the globe, we've decided to combat the growing issue.

What it does

Smart Orders looks to optimize food bought by event planners by using an algorithm that calculates the perfect order for the attendees, event planners, and the environment. We have created a survey to best identify event attendees’ needs that only needs to be completed once, ever. This allows us to maximize their satisfaction by tailoring their preferences to the order. Also, event planners are able to save money due to knowing exact needs and not overspending. Lastly and most important, the environment is improved through reduced food waste. In conjunction with our mission, we are donating 5% of our profits to food waste programs (like Food Forward, Food Waste Alliance, and End Hunger) that the users choose between.

How we built it

The bulk of our project is rooted in our order creator algorithm. We started by doing market research on the things that people tend to have the strongest opinions in. We then considered the ways in which this information could be processed in order to give meaningful results. The way that we built it, user preferences can be saved under their usernames and every event planner company can use our plug in to get the information on people’s food preferences. When the users agree to give the company this information (through a button) we will ask the user if they want to update their preferences. Event planners can create new events through us and we will have a database with all the users that signed up through their event creator. At any point in time the user can view the information and metrics and produce a quote.

Challenges we ran into

When implementing our idea we talked at a high level with a mentor and did not think about the choices of the services we were using. We built the front end using Wix to make sure we had a very visual and easy to use website by the time of submission. However, this did have some drawbacks since it made it harder for us to control the functionality of the website and limited the flexibility of features. We also built the backend using Java and then realised that the better choice would have been Python in order to make it easier to hook up the front and back end using servers. We sent a long time trying to work around what we had already built to hook up the front and back end but our lack of knowledge of serves unfortunately did not allow us to hook up the system in time. We do have a roadmap of how we would do this: re build the website using HTML/CSS and add functionality to it using JavaScript and then write the backend in Python, which would enable us to use the fact that it’s an scripting language to easily hook it up. We are firm believers that this could be accomplished with a little bit more time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the ability of our website to maximize solutions to multiple problems with minimum complexity. Whether it be event planners’ tight budgets, attendees’ pickiness, or the well-being of the planet, our product is unique because it targets multiple different needs and elegantly addresses them with a solution that requires very little effort from the users. Additionally, we are proud of the flexibility of our product design. With the ability to save food waste and recommend preferred food for situations outside of event planning, such as group dinner outings or local restaurant exploration, Smart Orders’ versatility

What we learned

As I mentioned in the challenges section this experience was very useful for us to learn how to put together different pieces. We have all taken several Compsci classes at Duke and none of them have taught us full integration of something. Thanks to several mentors who we talked to we got a better idea of how we can hook up different aspects of the projects and what needs to be deployed were. We got to learn how to use embedded HTML and JavaScript on websites and learned a lot about the limitations of using Wix.

What's next for Smart Orders

As Smart Orders gains users, it will build its database based on their preferences. Then, we can use machine learning to more accurately make predictions about the type of food that an event should cater, given information such as the location, number of attendees, feedback from past events planned, and other data (gender, age). This way, our algorithm will become more and more accurate, attracting more and more users. Additionally, Smart Order can be adapted to functionality beyond simply event catering. For example, groups of registered users can use Smart Orders to find a restaurant that fits their dietary and budget preferences. More long term, we can add event planning functionality, so we can not only recommend food but also facilitate invitations, effectively becoming the next EventBrite.