A program for stores to sell their almost expired goods to homeless shelters for cheap. Made for Ellehacks 2018.
Retailers today are responsible for 10% of total food waste and according to Marketplace on CBC, they went to Walmart and reported that 12 full bins of food were thrown out every 12 days. When an employee asked why they they threw away the food instead of giving it to people in need the manager said, 'If you just give it away to people, then why are they going to buy it from us?".
Not only does food waste contribute to greenhouse gases, but it also accounts for the lack of nutrition in many Canadians. There is currently a lack of funding for homeless shelters and food banks as they often struggle to meet the nutritional standards for the people who rely on their service. Many shelters rely on charitable donations, however the food that is donated is not adequate or nutritious enough for those who use this service for 3 meals a day and seven days a week.
In 2016 The Ottawa Food Bank allocated $60-thousand dollars to buy fresh produce over the winter months, but come January, all the funds were almost completely used up. This meant that they had to cut down on funding for other services they provided.
The Toronto Covenant for homeless youths spend over $1000 a day on food for 150 youths. With our service a lot of that money could be re-allocated to funding other services that these youths need.
Food Fetch is a platform that allows homeless shelters to access more nutritious food at a lower cost, while providing grocery stores an incentive to reduce their food waste by making a profit on the products they would’ve otherwise thrown out.
We designed our platform in sketch to conceptualize and then transitioned to building the platform with HTML5, using CSS3 and Javascript.
The biggest challenge we ran into was trying to find the right framework to build our platform on. We spent time going through and learning Express with Feathers, but ultimately found that it was not a framework that would allow us to complete a working prototype in the time frame. Our other challenge was taking the time in the beginning to flush out potential ideas and come to the conclusion of what we were going to focus on for our final product.
We are proud that we have a working prototype and a functioning map for our demo.
We learned in-depth HTML5.
The next step for Food Fetch is to branch out and reach more individuals that do not rely on homeless shelters or food agencies. Furthermore we want to work with other retailers that produce product waste that doesn’t pertain to food.
- html5
- css3
- javascript