FeedMe

Inspiration

Each year, one third of all the food the world produces is lost or wasted. Not only does this mean an economic loss, it means that all the natural resources used for growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and marketing that food were also wasted. Imagine 28% of the world's agricultural land grows crops that are wasted. That equals the total land area of China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Plus, the water wasted in growing those crops equals the annual flow rate of the Zambizior the Volga rivers, an amount that could cover all the world's household water needs. As agriculture and fisheries expand into wild areas overexploit natural resources, forest and marine habitats are lost along with their biodiversity. Above all, wasted food emits some three gigatons of greenhouse gasses. If this were a country, it would represent the third largest emitting country in the world. This cannot continue. With the future of more people and fewer resources, we cannot afford to throw our natural resources out with the garbage. FeedMe solves food waste. Our goal is to help businesses such as restaurants and grocery stores limit waste by notifying people in need before a food item is disposed of. If these businesses are throwing food out anyways, why not give it to those who cannot make ends meet.

What it does

FeedMe has two components as we allow restaurants to sign up in order to donate about to be thrown out food and users who would like to receive the food. Users are able to browse a catalog of restaurants and request a certain item. A restaurant can then accept the request and the user would be notified in real-time with a pop-up. Once the request is accepted, the user can then pick up their food product from the restaurant.

How we built it

FeedMe was developed using Python with Flask to handle all server requests and JavaScript with React for the frontend. In order to incorporate real-time communication between servers, we utilized Socket.IO and connected a listener to the front end.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into primarily consisted of connecting the servers to allow for real-time communication and having it run locally on each member's computer as each member had different versions of Node and Python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to come together as team in order to create an application that has the potential to assist those in need.

What we learned

As a team, we strengthened our knowledge of real-time communication between servers.

What's next for FeedMe

The next steps for FeedMe would be to incorporate a Google Maps feature where the restaurants could determine the time when users would arrive in order to determine whether they should notify other users of the supply deficit or not. Furthermore, including the ability for customers to filter out certain food products in the event of allergies would be a potential feature as well.