NCFresh

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  NCFresh logo

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  itemlist code

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  firebase code

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  Sign up page

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  Inventory page

Inspiration

We were inspired to develop an app combatting food insecurity because of our shared belief that nutrition is an essential part of life and health in general. We also have personal connections to the issue of food insecurity with our heritage coming from Haiti and India, both of which suffer from food insecurity unfortunately. We thought about what could help solve food insecurity and we believe that technology can play a massive part in addressing food insecurity by connecting people to the resources they need.

What it does

Our app provides this connection by allowing farmers to post their inventory and customers to view this inventory, while also using biographical sections (bios) to allow users to communicate with each other and form social relationships, as well as economic and business relationships. Customers on our app can view an inventory/database of produce, including which farmers sell it, how much it costs, and where it is. Farmers who use our app can make posts about their produce, available for customers to see. Both customers and farmers can add biographical sections to their profile giving personal details, information about the type of produce they sell/are looking to purchase, and what they are hoping to achieve by using NCFresh.

How we built it

We built NCFresh using ReactNative, Expo Go, VSCode, and Firebase. We developed the app, piece by piece, going through each essential feature. We started with the login page, then went through the different pages such as the About page, the inventory page, and the benefits page. We rough-drafted the UI with Canva Teams Pro. We edited the video on Fimora Wondershare. Our main communication platforms were our iMessage group chat for quick communication, Microsoft teams/Facetime for screen sharing and calling eachother, and Slack to communicate with our group advisor Siddharth, and to get updates and workshops.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran into came from our lack of experience with ReactNative. We have zero experience using ReactNative and very little experience using Javascript. This forced us to learn a new language to fulfill the vision for our app. We had to watch tutorials and read articles while we coded. Another major challenge came from us using a different route for user authentification (Firestore instead of Firebase) than any of the sources we found, because it was better tailored for our app. This forced us to change and adapt our code for it to work. Our last and possibly biggest challenge came when we downloaded a package we thought would help us, however it corrupted our code. At the time we didn't have backups of the app and this forced us to delete everything and start again on March 3rd, giving us 14 days to complete the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how we were able to adapt to something completely foreign and create a working app in a shorter time period than our competitors due to our time constraints. We are also proud of how we applied our knowledge of real-world problems to create real-world solutions. We're proud that this app could be a first step for the Charlotte area to spread awareness and solve food insecurity.

What we learned

During the "Ready, Set, App" competition, we learned to adapt. We were forced to change our approach and find new solutions multiple times during the project which pushed our critical thinking skills and made us grow as people. We also learned to prepare for the worst. This is because our lack of backup files, forced us to create an entire app within fourteen days while all having extracurriculars and other things on our schedule. This pressure pushed us to give our best effort, however, we have learned it's better to be safe than sorry.

What's next for NCFresh

We hope to take the feedback from the judges and further develop and refine NCFresh. Our short-term goal is to get NCFresh published in the App Store and gain at least 100 downloads in 2024. In the long term, we would like to spread awareness of food insecurity and begin to solve the problem in Charlotte. This app is the first step to solving food insecurity and we hope to lead to change in our community. In the future, we would like to add a messaging feature to the app to allow for even stronger connections and relationships. It would be a dream for our app to unite our community.

Built With

• canva
• expo-go
• firestore
• reactnative
• visualstudiocode
• wondershare