Inspiration:
Harvest Hero is a new solution to combat the growing issue of food waste. Our mission is to connect individuals to organizations that have excess food. We believe in spreading awareness of the global issue of food waste and creating a positive impact to make the world a better place. Food waste occurs for many reasons, but a significant amount of edible and nutritious food goes to waste because it's not harvested. That's where Harvest Hero comes in!
By 2030, the world’s population will exceed 8.6 billion people, all of whom will need access to healthy food. Much needs to change if we are to meet the challenge. Americans waste as much as 40% of all food grown. Considering all the resources that go into producing food, water, fertilizers, labor, and fuel, this is not a sustainable path for our country. We need better practices to utilize our finite amount of land and natural resources. Fortunately, many solutions such as Harvest Hero, are in the works to push an entire anti-food-waste movement forward.
What it does:
Harvest Hero is a web application that not only raises awareness regarding food insecurity within the United States and Canada, but also provides an effective solution to combatting this significant issue. Business establishments - such as restaurants, farms, and grocery stores - are able to sign up, register their business in order to be able to donate food to the public, by sending out a text message to individuals who sign up.
How we built it:
Harvest Hero was built with a MERN stack, and MongoDB Atlas. MongoDB was used to create databases and collections to store information about establishments that provided opportunities to glean food before it became food waste. We used a Twilio integration to send out SMS messages for businesses to be able to notify users when food is available to glean. We also used React for the frontend component, and Express.js to connect the backend with our API. We used Node.js to pull everything all together, and run and deploy all packages for our application.
Challenges we ran into:
It took us a significant amount of time to connect our database to our front end, as it was our first time working on backend development. We also had issues deploying our website to our custom domain name ("harvesthero.tech") from our GitPages. Because of that, our site is not deployed at the time of submission but our code is in an open repository.
We were not fully able to polish our frontend and make it look user-friendly as we ran into a lot of issues fetching data from our frontend to our backend - as we realized that our frontend was connected to the backend. However, our API was not able to send a request to our backend.
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
This is our first time learning about MongoDB Atlas and how to create a database and dive deeper into the field of backend development using Node and Express.js. Some of us also learned how to use React for the first time. We learned a lot in 36 hours and are very proud of how far we've come in those same hours.
What we learned:
We learned how to use React for frontend, and how to implement MongoDB for storing our data, as well as Postman for testing our APIs to verify that the client is able to send information to our server. We also learned how to connect our frontend and backend with Express.js and made it more robust using Node.js
What's next for Harvest Hero:
Our future goal is to create a dashboard panel with the account system so that businesses can create an account and it easier to manage data and learn how to use React routes to create pages for our website, so users can navigate between topics easily.
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