Everyone Eats

We create strong bridges between businesses, nonprofits, and consumers. We lay the foundation for a world where food waste is minimal, and donations are one-click away.

Inspiration

According to Feeding America, a national network of food banks, 1 in 7 Americans relies on a local food bank to eat. Yet, one third of the food produced globally is wasted, even though there are 17 organizations fighting hunger. Leftover, unused, and unsold food at a majority of businesses is often thrown away, while nonprofits and food banks struggle to find regular sources of food supplies to support people.

The food pantry was only open one day a month [ . . . ] the box he handed me would last about a week if I were careful. I still needed to find a way to feed my son.” - quoted by a parent who relied on the food bank.

Why wasn't this food accessible to nonprofits? Turns out, the lengthy process that nonprofits have to follow for finding, approaching, and convincing companies to partner with them is way too complex. Hours and sweat is spent to build the bridge with just one company, and there aren't enough hours to a majority of the wasted food.

So, we imagined a world where these bridges were already in place. And then we began working towards making this dream a reality.

What we do

Everyone Eats bridges the gap between non-profits and businesses to reduce food waste.

User-friendly maps show non-profits the businesses that are donating near them, and businesses the non-profits to donate to. These easily navigable dashboards allow businesses to donate easily and get charitable tax right-offs in the process.

Additionally, businesses receive philanthropy scores when they donate. A user-facing front allows everyday consumers to promote businesses with a high philanthropy score, which further motivates businesses to become regular donors.

How can this software be sustainable?

Since nonprofits already have donation pickup services in place, we only have development costs. Thus, there are quite a few approaches to monetize this software.

The current process nonprofits and businesses follow is costly on time and has logistical costs. Since we will be reducing these costs, we could provide our software at a cheaper, monthly subscription.

However, the above approach can only be confirmed with user research to find good margins. Thus, we would start out by taking a percentage of tax right-offs earned by donors.

Additional strategies we plan to use:

Low scoring businesses increase their score with cash donations, and Everyday Eats gets a percentage.
Donors and nonprofits pay to display advertisements

How we built it

Utilized the TomTom API to display locations of donors and charities.
Utilized React to build UI for component reuse.
Utilized Node/Express to setup api.
Utilized MongoDB to setup donors, charities and donation collections.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was knowing that charities can receive donations for free and donors can donate food themselves for free, we needed to come up with ways to generate revenue to help charities and donors without charging them for something they can do themselves for free. We tackle this challenge by researching the what process it takes for charities to receive donations, donors to donate and provide a solution that answers how can we make this process more efficient and convenient. We found out that donors receive tax write offs from their donations so we can take care of this process for them and take a percentage of that write off in exchange. We decided we can help donations and donors do the thinking in helping to distribute the food. From this would stem a user base that at a certain point which we could then create advertisement space to generate revenue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In 24 hours, we designed a business strategy to reduce food waste, one of the largest problems our society currently faces, and develop a minimal viable software solution. Additionally, we strategically allocated work among each other by identifying individual strengths and allocating team roles.

What we learned

We learned how to properly time manage and prioritize to develop a minimal viable product, by understanding time needed for planning, designing, developing, testing, and debugging. 2/3 of our time was spent in the testing and debugging cycle, since we were working with a very new API, and coordinating between team members.

What's next for Everyone Eats

Charities will be able to post a need for supplies, request for additional volunteers, and other needs. This will be visible to businesses and regular consumers. This would allow both businesses and regular consumers to donate additional leftover food and supplies with the click of a button. Additionally, various students have volunteering hours to fill and can use this as a platform to find positions. Locals could also use this to help their community.