FreshBay

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Routing Example 1
Locations of Food Centers
Routing Example 2
Business "Volunteers" Registration and List
Estimated

Inspiration

Around the world, millions of tons of excess edible food is wasted, dumped into the ground and in the garbage disposals - erased never to be seen again. Ironically, these millions of tons of food waste might be able to solve the issue of acute hunger and aid the estimated impoverished 8.5% of the world, or 700 million people, according to the World Bank (Link 1). It's surprising that, despite America's growing problem of food insecurity, that almost 40 percent of our food supply is gone to waste by the USDA. (Link 2). The need for sustainable and efficient resources to court this problem is needed, especially in California.

What it does

It is a loss for restaurants and grocery stores to throw away food that can still be eaten. FreshBay will, among others:

-Connect "volunteers" (restaurants, grocery stores, etc.) with food banks across California, who register with FreshBay's service

-Utilize ML algorithms to estimate the counties that will be most in need of food donations, thanks to historical and recent data available through Feeding America and the State of California

-Volunteers will be able to see these counties on the app and target their delivery efforts accordingly to make the best impact, FreshBay will also help them navigate there by optimizing their routes

How we built it

FreshBay is a website built using libraries such as Python's powerful scikit-learn, an ML library that offers operations on unsupervised and supervised learning models, as well as Django and the use of APIs, such as to target the locations of popular food banks.

Challenges we ran into

Certain challenges we ran into was processing the data from Feeding America for the model, relying and experimenting with data management, reorganization, and construction techniques through the Python library Pandas, as well as creating the connection between frontend and backend processing for a unified dashboard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of developing the ML model, and also designing an efficient user experience through maps and charts.

What's next for FreshBay

We hope to scale FreshBay to work across the nation, partnering with individual governments and Feeding America to bring sustainable and efficient food solutions.

Refer to our Slide Deck as well! Thank you!