Inspiration
In Australia, food waste is also a huge problem. Each year, we waste around 7.6 million tonnes of food - which equals to 312 kilograms per person. It also means, one in five bags of groceries is wasted food, costing over two thousand dollars per household a year.
Food waste costs the Australian economy $36.6 billion dollars each year, with a huge amount of land mass and water being used to grow food that will eventually be left unused and wasted.
Food is central to the human experience, both for our survival and happiness and as such, we decided to create a means towards conscious and reasonable consumption, to address the prevalent issue of food waste. Whether it is extra portions of food, leftover from the night ago’s feast, or prepackaged ingredients that you do not have a use for and wouldn’t want to waste, FoodChute is where you can ensure that no morsel is discarded.
What it does
By creating a convenient means to allow people to connect, for those who wish to donate to donate, and those who need to seek what they need, we wish to create a system where disposals remain empty of food waste and people do not go hungry. By doing so, the surplus food would not go to waste, as “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure”.
We aim to connect these two groups - the food donors and the receivers to solve their respective problems - finding a source to give away food, or searching and picking up surplus food from their neighbours.
After an user logs into their account and enables location, they see the explore page that shows food listings in the user’s local area. If interested in a particular listing, users can click “Request this item”, which sends a notification to the donor. In turn, people who wish to donate excess food can create a listing.
How we built it
- Python and React
- Ruby on rails
Challenges we ran into
- Had issue with integrating Python and React
- We were unable to address certain issues with the socket.io libraries for Python.
- Decided to create another MVP with Ruby on Rails
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Learning while creating. We are all beginners and while developing the product, we researched and learned a lot of new things and how to do stuff that will be useful for future projects.
Our team - all strangers - was formed only two days before the official start of coding, and we did not have a lot of time to discuss ideas. However, once we got started, the members actively communicated with each other to ask for help or opinions. We were dedicated to finding the cause of the problems together, especially during the tough moments of combining front-end and back-end, which requires several members’ efforts.
What's next for FoodChute
In the future, we are hoping to add a few features that would attract a larger number of users and improve accessibility, such as multi-language support and “post a request” function. Additionally, we want to expand our system to cater to restaurants and businesses with excess food to give to several users at once, or to a local charity group.
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