Produce Pals

Produce Pals helps students buy affordable produce by creating a platform for farmers and grocers to sell imperfect and near-best-buy-date foods at a discounted rate and suggest recipes using AI.

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Inspiration

As students, we were inspired to help students and other low-income individuals have access to healthy foods at an affordable price. The inspiration also came from experience working on a farm and existing companies like Imperfect Foods which also work on a model of reducing food waste, but do not actually provide the food at a price or model that makes it accessible on a low budget it is a subscription model that costs on average $60 per week.

What it does

Produce Pals provides a platform for farmers and grocers to sell produce that would have otherwise gone to waste at a lower price. There will be two user interfaces: one for the sellers, and one for the buyers. The seller inputs how much of different foods they have and their relative quality and condition. The food will then be sold at a flat discounted rate based on quantity and the average market price of that item as found through MongoDB. The buyer will have the opportunity to buy and reserve these bags through the website. Ideally, we would also work with schools to create hubs where farmers can bring their produce as part of this program. Grocery stores would also be able to participate, but the intended model is that consumers would pick up the groceries directly from the store as they tend to be more local.

How we built it

We built the first version of the wireframe on Figma, but after encountering expensive paywalls to convert the wireframe to source code we were significantly delayed. The back end was developed in React.

Challenges we ran into

Converting the front end to the source code to be able to connect it to the back end code was our most difficult challenge. The front end we developed was too advanced for us to be able to convert to source code with our capabilities in the time frame ie. it doesn't work yet

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the design of our website and the backend code that goes along with it.

What we learned

What's next for Produce Pals

Our next step is to continue to convert the wireframe to source code to be able to connect the backend code. Our next next step would be to reach out to a campus about setting up a produce hub for the farmers and reaching out to vendors most likely starting at farmers markets about setting up a small test market.

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