Zero Waste

Inspiration

Our project is inspired by our own awareness of the food we waste. We discussed how we ourselves are guilty of wasting food by forgetting “best-by” dates simply because of a lack of organization. We decided to apply this to a large scale industry, restaurants, with the goal of providing them with an accessible program allowing them to avoid wasting food by keeping tabs on their purchases and helping restaurants donate food that may have otherwise been thrown away.

What it does

ZeroWaste has two main goals: reduce food waste produced by restaurants while helping people in need by donating excess food to shelters and organizations. It does so in the following way: A) From a selection menu, the user inputs one of the options, “buy items”, which would ideally be their first step. - The restaurant inventory manager inputs the items the restaurant has bought for that week (eg. 5 kg of lettuce). - Further, they also input the “best-by” date of the product, or when the product begins to lose some of its quality or freshness. - Then, a csv file with the inputted information is created. B) The drop-down menu also includes two other options: “consume” or “donate”. - The consume function creates an updated excel sheet with the amount of food from the stock that has been consumed. - The donate function scans for the “best-by date” the inventory manager had inputted and informs them that the date has passed. - The excel is updated to remove the items that are being sent to donation. - A new excel sheet is created showcasing the amount that has been donating and is further updated so the restaurant can have a history of their donations.

How we built it:

We created four different functions using Python. The three main functions are the "buy", "consume", and "donate". Then, an overall function that calls all three of these. The program uses writes inventory and donation data into csv files.

Challenges we ran into

Our challenges can be classified into the following ways: project implementation and project functions. In terms of our project implementation, we first came up with the general concept/idea and decided to create a website that restaurant managers could access and use to keep tabs on their inventory. However, we faced obstacles in the process of creating that website; this allowed us to realize that it would be more realistic, in the time we had, to use Python to create csv data tables from user input instead of hosting the information on a website with a user interface. In terms of the specific functions we used, we faced issues in terms of extracting the data from csv files and finding a way to manipulate old data with the new user input data. Especially, we faced obstacles in terms of trying to to only remove the items whose best-by date had passed and then updating the list with that new information. In parrallel, we worked on creating a java application using

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As most of us are beginners to programming, and considering the fact that this is our first hackathon, we are proud that we managed to create a project from scratch on our own, without any external guidance.

What we learned

We have gained more knowledge on how to use Python and a variety of its modules. Even though we were unsuccessful in creating a website, we have nonetheless learned more about the fundamentals of Django. For some of us, we have also gained more experience in using GitHub for coding projects!

What's next for Zero Waste

The next step for Zero Waste would be to create a website with user interface. Additionally, considering the potential difficulties related with food donations, we recognize that the ongoing challenges related with reducing food waste. Thus, we would be interested in looking into how to give quantity recommendations to users when ordering items, to help them achieve net zero waste by reducing the amount of excess food in their inventory. This would require collecting, updating, and analyzing past data to reduce food that is wasted.