Foodrop

An app that brings communities together to volunteer, reduce food waste, and feed our neighbors in need!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for Foodrop comes from a personal anecdote. One day we finished eating dinner and it was around 9:30 pm. We then came out and decided to get donuts since Dunkin’ donuts were close by. We went inside and were shocked by the number of donuts left on the shelves: about 2/3 remaining. We weren’t worried at first but then after ordering our donuts, the employee told us something-I am going to throw these donuts out so you can take some more. This revealed a problem of food waste that we never had encountered before. On top of our personal experience, a few months ago a video on TikTok was circulating about an employee that was fired for exposing dunkin’ donuts food waste. Hence, we decided to make Foodrop.

What it does

Foodrop is a web application that connects volunteers with food sources (restaurants or venues) and nearby homeless shelters. The food sources are restaurants/venues that are throwing out perfectly edible food. The volunteer will pick up the food and transport it to a homeless shelter. This will ensure that the food doesn’t go to waste and will instead go to people who need it.

How we built it

We used dart, android studios, the Flutter framework, and firebase to develop it.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges with thinking about how to streamline the process between the sources of food, the foodroppers, and the homeless shelters.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to make a functional prototype of the foodrop app. We are also proud that we finished all the UI/UX and coding in the short time we were given. (We joined the hackathon a day late so we made everything in 12 hours).

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team to come up with the idea for the hackathon and then work on it step by step to complete the project. We also learned about different features that we could add to our app and what APIs would be helpful to implement in the real world.

What's next for Foodrop

Up next would be implementing the google maps API, firebase login and storage, and partnering with existing fast-food restaurants that will help support our initiative. We would start on the small scale with New Jersey (where we live) and the homeless shelters and restaurants (such as Dunkin donuts) here and then work on expanding nationwide.

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