DSBJ

Food Sharing Community - reduce food wastage

Comment

Inspiration

What inspired us to build this application was feeling the need to reduce food waste as we’ve witnessed first hand the amount of food that’s wasted after various events. There has to be a smarter way to connect all of this food with the people who need it, so the food isn’t gone to waste being sent to the compost.

What it does

Our DSBJ online platform bridges the gap between event planners and the local community to share food reduce to clear after events. After an event, event planners will pass the following information to DSBJ platform:

  • Image of the food
  • Food release time
  • Location
  • Food description

All the information from different events will be summarised and provided to the local community whereby they can choose which post-events they wish to go and consume the extra food (thereby reducing food waste). Food options are prioritised by order of distance to user.

Local communities will be able to contribute by upvoting the event planners for CSR initiatives. The event planners will have a history of their events and food-sharing, which could be a selling point in their PR and company’s CSR evaluation.

How we built it

We built the front end using React and linked it up with the back-end via Flask (Python), as well as using Firebase as our database. We used the TomTom API to build the web app, specifically using:

  • Search to compute location coordinates
  • Routing to compute navigation instructions to each event
  • Map display to generate map tiles to display to the user and superimpose navigation lines onto

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was trying to hook TomTom API to React and integrating everything. We had to research deeper into the different possibilities of connecting the back-end and front end, which ultimately landed us where we are now: using Python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to be able to come up with a prototype that display the functionality of what we envision within this short time span.

What we learned

From this challenge, we learned that there are various ways to actually reduce waste and we need to be specific in what we are targeting (reduce food waste or sustainability) in the short and long term.

What's next for DSBJ

Going forward, we are looking to bring the platform to Mobile Application (iOS/Android) as there is a rising trend of the mobile users. In terms of business side, we wish to expand to the retail industry as there is more revenue in that sector which is crucial for sustainability in the long run. Finally, we are looking to push the entire system to the cloud and run through AWS servers.

Share this project:

Updates