FeedForward

provider ingredients page
new landing page!

Inspiration

As former employees of various restaurants and grocery stores, we have seen first hand the vast amount of edible food wasted by such venues. This is food could be directed to those in need, yet millions of tonnes of food is disposed out due to the convenience it provides to these vendors. As such, we have been inspired to create a product that bridges the gap between these venues and those in need - helping us to alleviate food waste and issues such as the homelessness crisis.

What it does

FeedForward is a platform that connects these food providers (restaurants/grocery stores/etc), to those in need (foodbanks/etc). It does this by providing a platform to advertise excess food that providers have no need for, such as unused ingredients, left-over food, etc. On the other hand, it also provides a platform for receivers to view these locations, what foods they have available, locations, quantities, potential recipes, etc.

How we built it

We started with the MERN stack, using MongoDB atlas. We also used the google maps API to display the providers. We also used the spoonacular API to find possible dishes from a given list of ingredients. We planned to host on Azure, but due to technical hosting difficulties, we were unable to host. However, the project is majorly functional and can be interacted with through the github repo on localhost.

Challenges we ran into

We were all quite new to fullstack projects and most of the tech we used was the first time for us. As such, we had some trouble connecting the different stack layers together. in particular, connecting MongoDB with NodeJS with routes was quite challenging. We mostly completed thorugh the help from the mentors :) Additionally, we realised that hosting a fullstack app was significantly more challenging that a static website, particularly for free. many providers took significant time to deploy and as such we didn't have enough time to fully deploy on azure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were quite proud of the initial idea since it was quite extensible and scalable. There are many avenues we can extend the project through - for example, we can implement a photo to text API so that providers only need to take photos of ingredients and everything is automatically organised. Also, with the cloud platform Azure we can extend it to a larger scale quite easily by extending the compute and data resources. We're also quite proud of the clean and functional UI/UX which was intuitive to follow and use. Also since this is all of ours first hackathon ever - we're proud to have made something functional! Additionally, we're proud of providing a humanitarian service for the greater societal good - particularly adressing quite a few UN sustainable goals such as No hunger, good health, reduced inequalities, responsible consumption, climate action, life on land, no poverty, peace-and-justice :)

What we learned

We learnt quite a bit about various elements of the stack and how they interconnect together to make a complete application. We've also learnt specifically about how mongoDB routing works in relation to NodeJS which was quite a technical challenge. It was also great learning how devs can simultaneously collaborate through git (and other VCSs) to produce large-scale applications. Learning about API endpoints, and API integration was also great and expanded our technical skillset.

What's next for FeedForward

We have quite a few ways we want to extend feedForward. Firstly, we want to actually deploy the website - hopefully allowing real-world users to make good use of the application for societal benefit. We would like to add some additional features including: a messaging interface, a connect-to page, opening hours for proviers, food photo-to-text functionality for provider convenience, etc.