Taste of York

This project aims to reduce food waste and encourage restaurants on campus to be more environmentally friendly.

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Inspiration

I have always found it very difficult to understand how easily restaurants could just throw away all of their food at the end of the day. It’s if understandable they say that they want to sell new food the next day. But that does not justify throwing away all the leftovers. I’ve always felt that there were better ways to deal with it. A few years ago, I came across an application called Too Good To Go, which I would say is one of the biggest inspirations for our application. Although there is a similar application like that, I wanted to go along with this idea anyway. I’ve noticed that the lack of success from Too Good To Go might be because they’ve focused on too large of an audience. I feel that if we focus on a smaller audience, the restaurants within the campus only, then there is a better chance of succeeding, as there are a lot of students living here.

What does our project do?

The main goal of this project is to combat food waste and encourage restaurants on campus to be more environmentally friendly. This is done by implementing a system we call SpareMeals where restaurants can give out food at discounted prices or for free at the end of each day instead of throwing away the leftovers. Our application also doubles as a food-focused social media platform where people can share pictures of the food they’ve bought on campus.

We’ve decided to make our application campus-focused because we want to start small and have only a select number of restaurants in an area to adopt the SpareMeals service. We believe that focusing on a smaller audience with the best of our efforts would make a greater change than if we were to focus on a bigger audience without being able to put in our utmost effort.

What it does

The main goal of this project is to combat food waste and encourage restaurants on campus to be more environmentally friendly. This is done by implementing a system we call SpareMeals where restaurants can give out food at discounted prices or for free at the end of each day instead of throwing away the leftovers. Our application also doubles as a food-focused social media platform where people can share pictures of the food they’ve bought on campus.

We’ve decided to make our application campus-focused because we want to start small and have only a select number of restaurants in an area to adopt the SpareMeals service. We believe that focusing on a smaller audience with the best of our efforts would make a greater change than if we were to focus on a bigger audience without being able to put in our utmost effort.

How we built it

React, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Material UI, Git, Canvas

Challenges we ran into

  • Most of us did not have the experience in working with others in a group and it’s our first hackathon
  • Merge conflicts
  • We are all familiar with different languages, so we had to find a middle ground and also learn some new concepts in a few minutes
  • Dealing with compiler errors and brainstorming solutions

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For most of us, it was our first hackathon and some of us have never even worked on projects from beginning to end. We believe it was a huge opportunity to get a taste of what working in the real world would feel like. Although we ran into many challenges and accomplished a lot less than we would have hoped for, we still managed to learn a lot of new things we didn’t initially expect to learn through this experience.

What we learned

  • The version control tool :git
  • When an error occurs, how to solve the problem under the tight deadline under a high pressure.
  • Collaborating with each other
  • Delegation of tasks
  • time-management (knowing when to keep working and when to take breaks)

What's next for Taste of York

The next part is building the backend, maybe using node.js, express.js, and then connecting with the database like mongodb and mongoose, so we don’t need to use dummy data, and then test the api with Postman. Create several collections about users, studentPicks, restaurants, spareFood, then we can add documents inside these collections. Also we will work on the signup/login part in order to make it more real for example adding authentication for user credentials. The layout of this application is not that beautiful enough, we will fix that in the next step. We are planning to use React Bootstrap or something else to make it fully responsive, so it can be both web and mobile responsive.

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