This is a prototype app my team and I made at UofTHacks VII to help with the issue of food wastage.
We build this app mainly to tackle the issue of food left-over by restaurants and catering services. Most of the time food that is unsold for the day is being thrown away at the end of the day despite the food still being delicious and edible. This is clearly a waste of resources and solving this should be one of our top priorities. Also, there are people that cannot afford to eat a decent meal and are struggling to survive each and every single day. We want to create a platform to connect these restraunts, event organisers, and basically any individual/organization that requires a lot of food for the day to different homeless shelters and refugee camps close to them to avoid wastage and both sides benefit.
We used Java in Android Studios to build this.
From the general masses POV: They can actively make contribution to this social cause by doing business with organizations that participate in giving away their leftovers. They can even use this app to get coupons, loyalty points and other discounts at those outlets. They also get the option to make direct donations to help scale this apps coverage and get in-app points they can use later.
From the organizations POV: They will gain good publicity by contributing to a social cause and develop customer loyalty, they dont have to worry about disposing leftover and they can use this app to introduce discounts, give customers loyalty points, market themselves and monitor their analytics. Both, organizations and users get to see the leaderboard of top contributers while they can also monitor their own analytics in much more detail.
We are planning to incorporate google maps to show the nearest shelter for people to donate as well as showing the amount of food that has been donated to each of the shelters. In this way, users can see their positive impact in their community in real-time. We hope to scale this app to avoid all sorts of wastage, like clothes and furniture but that will require a different rewarding scheme and incentives.