victorinspace / food-for-thought-mobile

The mobile app for Food For Thought.

This repository holds the Capstone project for the Punchcode 2018 Summer cohort.

Our goal was to find a way to connect restaurants with excess food inventory to charities and food pantries in need of food donations. This project was completed at the request of Las Vegas-based RevUnit, a digital product development agency. We were given some basic design plans which helped us to plan our MVP and given 10 days to produce a working application.

Based on data gathered by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and local charity Three Square we now know that about 15 percent of the Las Vegas valley community suffers from food insecurity. That number includes 123,000 food-insecure children, or roughly 40 percent of the total number of hungry in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is currently home to almost 150 different organizations that provide meals and various food donations. These groups are spread throughout the valley and operate on different schedules for providing meals to those in need.

In spite of this there still exists a 50.2 million-meal gap between the meals needed by the hungry in Las Vegas and the meals made available by local charities.

A quick search on Yelp revealed that there are 3400 businesses in the Las Vegas valley that are categorized as "restaurants". This number does not include other businesses that regularly provide food, such as bars or even markets, or catering companies that produce large amounts of food on demand.

The hunger issue in Las Vegas is not about having enough meals available, or having enough hungry people to feed. It is simply a logistics issue of getting a large supply of available food to a large population of hungry people. Therefore, this project aimed to streamline the logistics concerns and provide incentives to local businesses and charities to participate in this project and eliminate hunger in the Las Vegas valley.

Our site allows for the tracking and reporting of donations by local businesses for tax-reduction purposes. It also allows these businesses to examine food waste in a quantifiable way in order to reduce overspending on their own terms. Local charities are able to select only the food donations that fit their particular needs for that day and can see in real-time as donations become available across the valley.

We believe that this project lays the groundwork for a nationwide system to match restaurants with available donations to charities in need of those donations and we are honored to be part of such a worthy cause.