Moving to Kingston for university, our team was overwhelmed by the large population of homeless people in the city. At the same time, our experiences in residence exposed us to just how much food gets wasted by restaurants at the end of the day. Both parties are suffering – the homeless are left starving, and the restaurants are losing money – but both their problems stem from inverse issues – a lack of food, and an excess. There’s also a silent third-party suffering too, which is the environment. When food gets wasted, that means all the energy and resources used to produce it go to waste too, which, in our global economy, means a lot of CO2 gets released into the environment. In fact, a third of all CO2 emissions caused by humans is produced by food waste.
Our team saw these issues and realized that we can use our passion for technology to help bridge this issue. Food Avalanche connects homeless people, based off of the City of Kingston’s database, to local restaurants that have surplus food. It geo-locates the user and displays which restaurants have meals available, as well as how many. It then gives them directions to the restaurant.
Coming into the hackathon, we didn’t know much – in fact, it was a struggle to even read some of the documentation since we did not understand what many keyworks meant – such as an API. However, over the course of the weekend, we became well-versed with these terms, and learned about a wide range of tools and languages, so we were able to make a guided decision on which tools we should use. We learned how to develop websites with React, however we did not end up using it. As well, we learned JavaScript, which we used in conjunction with Google Maps API to produce our live map. Since Velo was promoted during this hackathon, we decided to try it out as well, and learned a lot about the capabilities and limits of this software. Lastly, we gained a deeper understand of how to work well in a high pressure, time-limited, environment. Reflecting on the weekend, we realized that we should have taken more time to fully flesh out exactly what we wanted to do, and to split up the tasks between us better. While we worked well this time, we would be a lot more efficient if each person specialized and worked in depth on their own niche (ex. Building the database, styling the site, etc).
Challenges were more common than successes for us, but that’s the best way to learn. One of the biggest issues we had was embedding our live map – which used a mySQL database, PHP, Javascript, and the Google Maps API – into the Velo site. However, we adapted to this limitation and tried to find other solutions, such as hosting our map separating. Another big challenge was creating the live map, as there were many aspects of this, from connecting the forms–specifically the method and order we connected them - along with the limitations of different web browsers in rendering the embedded content we planned to use. Working collaboratively was also difficult, as only one person was able to edit the website at a time. We adapted and connected a laptop to the desktop monitors to display the website, and cycled through each person having access at a different time, while others were still able to watch (on the monitor).
A major accomplishment we made this weekend was successfully working with and manipulating iframes , as well as using APIs. The live map we developed took a lot of work, and a lot of ingenuity – we leveraged limitations of software to our advantage to give the map all the features we wanted, which otherwise would have required a lot more time and experience.
We would love to keep developing this project to be able to give back to our community of Kingston, and work on a cause we love. If given the opportunity we would, of course, improve the functionality of our website. We would add an automation system for updating the number of meals available. An idea for this is to assign users a QR code that restaurants can scan when they pick up a meal. We plan to also move this project to an app, and created a Figma prototype for a potential React app. As well, we would work on the legal/business side of this project. To incentivize restaurants to donate excess meals, instead of throwing them out, we aim to explore a process through which these businesses would receive a donation tax credit for donating their meals to us. Since they would be able to recover some of the costs of the food waste, as well as gain good PR, they would feel more incentivized to work with us. We have so many more ideas on how we can improve this project, and where we would like it to go, and are excited to keep working on it!