WasteLess

Our idea was created from the personal challenge we and our friends face every day. Being a group of millennials as well as more and more environmentally conscious citizens, we wanted to lessen our negative impact, starting from very bottom, from our trash. We had a dilemma how can we reduce the amount of wasted food and be more conscious conscuments when having an intense lifestyle with many professional and personal commitments? We realised that our main problem is not knowing what we actually have in our fridge! What usually happens is we usually go out late from work and being tired or in a rush between meetings we just storm into the shop and buy whatever catches our attention. Later we discover many times the same product half empty already in the fridge or we actually lose the appetite for something we bought impulsively. Later those products land in trash piling up to 88 million tons of food wasted annually in UE. Knowing what was the problem we started to think how to solve it. We decided to create an application saving your shopping information, tracking the food consumption and then analysing in order to help you reduce your food waste. On the way, using design thinking methods, talking with our potential customers and empathising with them we realised we would need to implement an automatic scanner for receipts, because as our potential customers are busy people, they wouldn’t have time to introduce all the products to the application manually. Later we were thinking to set default expiration dates (possible to change manually), basing on which application would be sending notifications to the customer. However, another challenge for our idea was the current pandemic, being discouraged in the beginning thinking that people would have now bigger struggles than reducing their food waste we realised that actually our application may be helpful for people manage well their food supplies in this challenging time. We all could see the scenes of people living shops with dozens of bags in their hands or fighting over pasta… talking with our potential customers we realised their struggle now is about wise food management and keeping connection with people while being stuck in the house. While in terms of conscious shopping our idea was already tackling this issue, we also decided to add the feature of recipes suggestions and exchange (between friends), which allows our customers to use all their stored food and keep in touch as well as keep inspired by their friends. Our main challenge is to make sure the application is as helpful and simple as it can be, so that we can save food, many and time of our community.