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Homepage
Inspiration
1 in 6 Americans struggles with hunger, but 33% of all food is wasted. We decided that if we could make a product that allocated wasted food to help feed those who are food insecure, we could help leave our mark on ending world hunger. We also, having volunteered at soup kitchens, noticed their struggle to track inventory and understand what they have to use. Since most of their systems involve volunteers simply stacking up cans, we hope that this will provide a good understanding and method of physical organization as well as data collection. Pantries are facing growing demand, and inventory tracking can help control and predict future needs.
What it does
Our website allows local restaurants to donate leftover food to a food pantry in Gainesville. With this, restaurants can learn more about challenges faced by residents in Alachua as well as give back to local food pantries and help the community. This website also provides resources to assist pantries with their inventory systems to (eventually) help plan for the growing demand of food in Alachua, and understand the resources that they have. The pantry is able to accept donations which will populate into a database in MySql, and then see a dashboard describing the various food types from which they have been donated.
How we built it
We made our website in atom using html and java, and imported data sources through mysql. We also utilized tableau and excel for data visualization and storage.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was to were to even start coding a website. Three of us our industrial engineers and have never coded a website before, so figuring out the avenue to take was a huge challenge. Another challenge our team faced was learning how to input form data from our html file into MySql, which proved challenging and used different languages and processes we were unfamiliar with.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we made a fully functioning website for the first time! We are also very proud of our graphic design work and how well we worked together as a team! All of us went in head first together and as we pieced the puzzle pieces together, we were able to effectively help each other learn html/mysql.
What we learned
Coding/software wise we learned html, css,MySql, and Tableau , but overall we learned how to work as a team, ask the right questions, utilize each others strengths, and be proud with the journey and how far we came! We also learned that making something we care about with the potential to help others is a great way to use our industrial engineering mindset to learn new skills and create a website we know has great potential tp help the members in our own community.
What's next for Give a Plate
In the future, we would like to expand our product to be used in food pantries and restaurants all around the world! We would also like to improve the customization and usability for each food pantry/restaurant. In addition, we would like to utilize optimal order quantity to help food pantries not only accept donations, but keep better track of their inventory and expiration dates!
Within 2-3 years, we would like to expand this to also work for individual households to donate, and even offer a delivery service through partners such as lyft or uber. Overall, no matter if our product hits one or one hundred counties, we know it will make a difference in helping to end world hunger!
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