Food delivery + Waste Tracker system

Select your order!
Choose greener options during checkout!
Earn points for your green choices!
Collect points and earn rewards!
Track your waste footprint!

Inspiration

Due to the increasing number of food deliveries, there has been a rise in usage and disposal of plastic food packaging. Our solution is a food-delivery app that can track the amount of food packaging waste that your order generates and rewards your eco-friendly choices accordingly with prizes.

What it does

Our app adopts a two-pronged approach to gamifying sustainable practices, incentivizing the consumer to consciously choose to use sustainable packaging, while also encouraging restaurants to use sustainable packaging so as to acquire more customers.

The initial steps remain similar to typical food delivery apps: click the food you want to order and add it to cart. Once you reach the checkout page, you can check the food packaging offered. If the restaurants offer biodegradable or recyclable packaging, you can choose them and you can gain “friendly points”. Choosing non-biodegradable and non-recyclable packaging options will give you no friendly points. If the packaging is fixed for the restaurant, then the corresponding points will be awarded.

With friendly points, you can redeem in-app vouchers. Restaurants with sustainable packaging options will earn a ‘greener choice’ label so as to promote them to customers who want to make the green choice.

How we built it

Communication of the idea is key in a hackathon. Initially starting with a web-application, we soon realized that our idea is better communicated as a UI/UX wireframe. Hence, we decided to proceed with using Figma to create an app simulation that conveys our idea much more clearly.

Challenges we ran into

The initial idea was to analyze plastic use by tracking the type, weight and size of food packaging, for the purpose of showing different messages to convince customers to switch to self-pickup options. However, not only do restaurants have to manually key in what packaging they use for each and every menu item, customers can also simply ignore such messages, limiting the effectiveness of our solution.

Hence, we brainstormed and adopted the use of gamification into our solution, implementing a point-reward system to incentivize sustainable behaviour for both involved parties, while also narrowing our focus to the type/material of packaging used.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have developed a solution that benefits both the customers and the restaurant, and is easily scalable if used as an extension to existing food-delivery apps in the market instead of a standalone app.

What's next?

Our idea can be adopted either as a standalone application, or an extension to existing food-delivery services, out there like Grab or Foodpanda. We can thus pitch the idea to the relevant stakeholders.

In addition, fine-tuning the points and rewards system would be another step forward, and may require pilot testing and sustainability research.