Foodie Buddie

save the earth with food sharing :)

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Inspiration

We are a team of four international students from three different countries: Myanmar, Mexico, and South Korea.

One thing we have in common was that we totally love the sweet and greasy American food. But almost every time we went out to eat in restaurants around the States, a serving was way too much to finish in one meal. Sometimes we took the leftover food and re-cooked it, but it wouldn't taste the same. In worst cases, the food spoiled and we just had to wast the food.

We've also found that a lot of people had the same problem and many restaurants around the state were facing the issue of food waste. People usually could not finish their plate and a lot of food went to waste.

We’ve also found out that food wastage was a very big problem in the states. More than 80 billion pounds of food were thrown away each year and 40% of the US food supply is wasted each year.

So we came up with this idea: Foodie Buddie.

What it does

Foodie Buddie is a food sharing app that connects the customers and restaurants. Using Foodie Buddie, customers can make a personalized order where they can adjust the amount of food they would get from the restaurant. If they choose less amount of food than one serving, they will receive points.

They can either accumulate the points and use the points to purchase food later on or sell the points to others.

People who eat more than a serving can buy the points can use it to order food more than a single serving. Therefore, foodie buddie will be connecting those who eat less than a serving and those who eat more than a serving.

In that way, food waste will be reduced in both sides and also for the restaurants.

How we built it

Foodie Buddie is an application built mainly using flutter. The application is designed to limit food waste as well as positively impact the environment.

The UI is managed via flutter and dart. With a flutter, we were able to create a responsive UI for our app. In addition to our UI implementations, we also used NCR BSP API to assist with the communications between the user and the restaurants. By using this API, the application will be able to carry out the major points of sales processes, such as payments.

Challenges we ran into

As emerging Hackers, we faced several major challenges.

The first obstacle we faced was trying to familiarize ourselves with flutter and dart. Dart and Flutter was a new language / library for all of us to work with during this two-day hackathon. However, we tried to seek help from our emerging mentor as much as possible. By the help of the workshops and mentors, we were able to go through it very well.

The second obstacle we faced was trying to implement NCR APIs into our product. The APIs were advanced and we had to invest a lot of our time trying to understand how the APIs worked.

The last obstacle we faced was trying to work across different timezones. Since our team is composed of individuals from three countries, time difference affected the way we cooperate with our team. We had to respect our teammates' personal wellbeing and at the same time also focus on our product for this hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As an emerging team, we are really proud of learning how to create functional UI for our product and implementing the BSP NCR API. In addition to the technical accomplishments, we are also proud of the concept of our application.

We came up with an application that promotes the sharing mindset, while at the same time limiting food waste in the world. With COVID19, some people have been struggling more than ever with finding food for themselves. We are proud that this application also provides a helping solution for those people by giving an incentive for the user to donate their acquired points to needed people. They, then, can exchange the points for a warm meal. All in all, with the sharing and caring mindset being promoted, we believe that a positive impact is sure to be generated.

What we learned

From very scratch, we were able to create a flutter application. Through this process, we learned both hard and soft skills.

Hard Skills:

From not even knowing the syntax of dart, self-learning flutter within 24 hours allowed us to develop the skill of how to effectively understand and use language documentations.

This essential skill allows us to be a fast and adaptive learner in today's rapid technological world. Throughout our learning journey, we also gain some insight into how well-known companies apply the language for professional application development.

Soft Skills:

Gaining soft skills are as important as gaining hard skills.

Being a diverse group, we learned how to collaborate and communicate efficiently with people from different cultural backgrounds. In order for this collaboration and communication to be successful, we had to use several collaborating platforms, such as slack and github.

Throughout all the meetings and shared documents, the most important lesson we learned was how to efficiently split the workload between teammates that live in different time zones.

What's next for Foodie Buddie

Our ultimate goal is to develop and spread our app so that the people who eat less and the people who eat more can swap in real-time and decrease the amount of food wasted in the U.S. as much as possible.

We plan to gather restaurants and customers who are interested in preserving the earth environment by reducing food waste to join our app. As more and more people join Foodie Buddie, the better our world will become.

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