Inspiration
All of the FoodNex team have extensive experience volunteering with food pantries and food banks throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and some even occasionally seek out food at these areas. Through this, we've realized the severity of the issue: food insecurity. Hundreds of families each event seek food assistance from surrounding pantries, and the process is always straining for all parties involved. With our team's technical foundations, we sought to reduce this and allow more foodstuff to be directed towards those in need through our app - FoodNex.
What it does
FoodNex is a mobile application that connects businesses and individuals with surplus food to hunger assistance organizations in their area. Through the application, users can view nearby food pantries and banks, send custom donation requests to food banks and food pantries to ensure that food banks and food pantries can use the donation items, and create as many requests as they would like anytime and send to as many food banks and food pantries.
How we built it
This application was built through the Flutter SDK, an open-source software development kit made by Google. For our backend, we are using the Back4App platform, and we are using OpenSignal to handle push notifications for our users.
Challenges we ran into
By building this app, we encountered numerous challenges along the way. First, ensuring that our database would not be overloaded in requests was imperative was we would not be able to afford the extra database costs in our plans.
What's next for FoodNex
We have begun building the second phase of our application which is a volunteer and inventory management system that will work with the donation management system currently in the application.
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