With the recent cutting of USDA SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, food banks nationwide faced a severe funding crisis. We took a look at the gap in funding, and thought of ways we could bridge both the funding gap while finding innovative new avenues to bring in more food to food banks by recovering food.
Our journey would lead us to discussing various methods of reclaiming food. We learned by contacting a food bank directly, that food banks already work with grocery stores and event venues to reclaim excess food. The insight helped to narrow down our project’s scope to focus on people and their excess foods. We reached out to seniors and mentors to determine our projects’ technical and real world viability. After our conversation, we further narrowed down the scope of our project, focusing on reclaiming expiring food in people’s homes.
All of the sudden, we had found the perfect balance in our project.
In taking photos and labelling food, our clients provide us with a golden opportunity to collaborate with AI companies, who would love our prepackaged data for training AI. Our collaboration will allow for our application to be self funded, while our points system would allow our benefits to trickle down to our clients as well, rewarding them for their altruism. The frequent exposure of clients on our application to food banks and their initiatives also greatly encourages more donations directly to the food bank, creating a mutually beneficial relationship between our application and food banks, at no extra cost to them.
From there it was up to us to bring our vision to reality. The challenge was daunting, but we preserved nonetheless. We learned and experimented in a new language and IDE with swift and Xcode. We worked with firebase for the first time. While the steep learning curve set our progress back for a while, we were able to get our app to run successfully. Next was figuring out our pipeline for the app and mapping out the different screens and tabs. Once we got into the groove, we became unstoppable, and our application was completed.
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