School Bites

Inspiration

Our biggest inspiration stemmed from personal experiences with school lunch systems, combined with our team’s shared passion for tackling the growing global waste crisis. Each of us had witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies and food waste in schools, sparking a desire to create meaningful change. In the United States alone, schools waste approximately 530,000 tons of food every year—an amount that could feed over 200 million people worldwide. This staggering statistic served as a wake-up call for us. We realized the potential to make a significant impact, not just by reducing waste but also by redistributing unused food to those in need. That’s why we created School Bites: a solution designed to streamline school lunch systems, reduce waste, and ensure leftover food finds its way to people who truly need it.

What it does

Our platform streamlines school meal management by allowing students to pre-order from curated menu options while handling payments directly through the portal. This approach creates accountability for ordered meals and includes a price incentive system that encourages pre-ordering. On the administrative side, we've integrated a food waste reduction feature that connects unused meals with local food banks. Understanding that student choice increases consumption, we've implemented monthly and annual voting systems where students can select from approved meal options, giving them a voice in their nutrition while maintaining dietary standards.

How we built it

We built is with VITE, Supabase, and lots of different UI libraries.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several obstacles during our project development. At first, our team was divided on how to address leftover food waste, but we soon realized that creating an effective online platform required a more concrete implementation approach. After aligning on our vision, our biggest challenge came with Supabase integration—something none of us had much experience with. Through lots experimentation and a little while of troubleshooting, we finally developed a workable database schema and refined our user profiles to a point where we were satisfied with their functionality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Biggest Accomplisment is honeslty how well the UI came together with the whole website because we realy wanted it to be something that student woudl acutally use rather than something that looks bad.

What we learned

We learnt a new type of backend which is Supa base. We leant how to better work as a team with gtihub and majorly work thrugh bugs.

What's next for School Bites

Next would be to try and implement an AI model that we have. Then we market it all school with a slogan of increased sustainability with seamless integration.

Built With

• github
• supabase
• typescript
• vercel
• vite