Food Hub

Group Picture

Inspiration

The inspiration for this application, FoodHub, comes from the fact that so much food gets wasted due it expiring and it never reaches anyone. It just goes to trash. That's food that cab feed hungry families and serve its purpose just being lost because of a portal that connects its diminishing value with customers.

What it does

FoodHub is able to connect grocery stores with the community, so that there is communication regarding when products will expire and what discounts will be placed as a result of the expiration. Grocery store owners are able to log their products at a discounted price and have the initiative to do so to not completely lose their money when the product expires. Customers throughout the community are able to view a range of stores and see reduced prices for select types of goods that they may be looking for. This facilitates customers to buy near expiring goods in a act that both saves them and the store money. We were able to use twillio to actually further communicate with the customer, as if a customer signs up on the website, they can get notified when a certain type of product has been uploaded by a grocery store to FoodHub.

How we built it

We built it using Flask for the backend and Cockroach DB to store information about a store.

To send messages to users when a food item appears, we are using Twilio messenger.

For the frontend, we used HTML, CSS, and JS to display all the pages and load information from the Flask endpoint.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into had to do with connecting the different parts of our system altogether to make a cohesive application. This included using a unknown database called CockroachDB to store information that that was passed through multiple html and Javascript files, interpreting that data, and sending it back in an organized and correct manner. This included being able to project it real time on our website through dynamic processing and the use of Twillio to have better and faster communication with our customers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were able to overcome the many challenges that come with connecting so many different parts, many of which we never had experience with before, to make a cohesive and functioning program that has real life application. Debugging can be a nightmare, and with variables being sent and received over so many pathways, keeping track of that was an accomplishment.

What we learned

We learned about Flask and how to use Cockroach DB. We had no experience with either of these technologies and learned them on the day of the hackathon.

What's next for FoodHub

We can build a mobile app for the application to make it more user friendly. We can expand messaging with Twilio to also include emails. Finally, we can make the UI more user friendly.