SustaiNibbles

Poster & Logo
Interface: /nearby function

Inspiration

One of our teammates got inspiration behind SustaiNibbles from one of their sisters, who works part-time in a café. At the end of her shifts, she often brings back leftover sandwiches—still fresh and entirely consumable but unable to be sold the next day. She told me this was standard practice across many cafés and restaurants. While these businesses dislike the idea of wasting food, they often lack the infrastructure or connections to donate it. This gave us the idea to develop SustaiNibbles, aiming to provide an accessible platform for businesses and individuals to send and receive notifications about available surplus food, making it easier to share what would otherwise go to waste.

What it does

SustaiNibbles (Sustainable + Edible/Nibbles) is a Telegram bot designed to tackle food waste by providing individuals with leftover food from food related businesses.

Catering companies often discard leftover meals after events, furthermore, food and beverage establishments frequently face unsold items at the end of the day or week. SustaiNibbles aims to provide an accessible platform for businesses and individuals to send and receive notifications about available surplus food, making it easier to share what would otherwise go to waste.

How we built it

SustaiNibbles was built using the python-telegram-bot library on Python to interface the Telgram UI, with MySQL. The telegram bot was initialised using Telegram's BotFather.

Challenges we ran into

None of us have created a telegram bot before, and we had to pick up the syntax swiftly to build SustaiNibbles. However, some of us had experience developing a Discord bot before, and we managed to bridge our existing knowledge with the nuances of the python-telegram-bot library. Additionally, as the team members came from various backgrounds, there was a need for picking up new technologies and concepts as well as knowledge transfer - which were overcome with teamwork.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to develop SustaiNibbles within the short time frame if the hackathon, as well as the knowledge that we have picked up. We managed to overcome hurdles like bugs in our code and knowledge gap through working together and communicating, which was the greatest takeaway from this hackathon.

What we learned

Most of us picked up new skills along the way, such as the python-telegram-bot library features and structure and MySQL. Other than hard skills, we also learnt to communicate with each other throughout the development of this project, teamwork and picking up technologies on our own through referencing documentation.

What's next for SustaiNibbles

Due to time constrains, we we not able to implement as many features as we would like. Should we choose to proceed with the SustaiNibbles initiative, we would like to implement more features such as cloud deployment and turning it into a chatbot extension on websites.