Food waste has been an increasingly prominent problem in Singapore, where we generated a shocking 817 thousand tonnes just in 2021 alone! Food wastage brings forth several implications, from unnecessary wastage of already scarce resources to even larger issues such as climate change. Food waste is the 3rd major climate change contributor, leaving a global carbon footprint of 3.3 gigatonnes carbon dioxide! This is especially troubling in the current climate, where food security has been constantly threatened, from incidents such as the banning of live chicken exports from Malaysia just last month. It is perhaps hard to imagine in a developed nation generating so much food waste, there exists communities of people that do not have enough money to eat more than 1 meal a day. Therefore, Food 4 Good seeks to not just target the food waste problem, but to also redirect excess food toward these communities, especially the underprivileged. This will certainly have the added effect of aiding Singaporeans financially, in view of rising food costs and economical stress. After all, why waste food when it can go to someone in need?
Our solution encompasses an accessible platform that connects givers, who have excess food, and those in need. We have found that businesses or individuals with excess food often face challenges in finding convenient avenues for food donation. This is particularly common for individuals and smaller businesses such as hawker centre stalls, where amounts of excess food is often varying. As such, their ultimate decision often results in disposal of the excess food.
Our team thus feels that it is pertinent to form a bridge that allows these businesses to come on board easily, as a platform for them to share and reach out to others in need. With this bridge, businesses can simply share the information with the vast user base of our application, who can view it easily with a touch of a button. This further directs users to places which they may not have known had excess food, allowing them to have a good meal, while at the same time, reducing food wastage.
Our team also recognises that food waste is still inevitable in the current social environment, which led to our solution also educating users on how to recycle food waste on their own. Our platform could also be used to link recycling organisations to these businesses with food waste, allowing them to have increased visibility on food waste sources. This could highly facilitate these organisations in their recycling efforts and increase their efficiency.
We also seek to encourage these behaviours via positive reinforcement, by incorporating leaderboards and recognition measures (such as earning a feature in our application). With this positive reinforcement, businesses can stand to benefit from the boost in public image, especially since ESG is an increasingly important focus area for corporations. Our solution also utilises the appeal of friendly competition as an additional pull factor.
Driven by our previous experiences and motivations, further fueled with considerations such as accessibility, our team collectively decided that an application was most apt for our concept. During the development phase, our frontend was established using Kotlin and XML, while our backend development involved Firebase for data storage and authentication.
There were challenges indeed, such as the time constraints, which hampered the range of features we initially ideated. Although we had many features we felt strongly for, the time constraints meant that we would need to forgo some features and focus on the truly essential features. Our team ultimately decided on the current solution as we discussed its impact and reach, further refining it to maximise impact and allow room for expansion.
Another challenge we faced was also the demands on our skill sets our solution would entail. Despite our team having experience in coding, we were not particularly exposed to app development, and often felt we were treading on uncharted territory to face unknown problems. Our backgrounds also varied drastically, where our team members had vastly different expertises – Accountancy to Computer Science. This meant that each member had different skill sets and weaknesses which could affect the project’s progress. However, different expertises and skill sets also bring in different perspectives and benefits. Our team utilised this to our advantage, and employed strategic planning. Each team member was able to shine in different areas that demanded different skill sets. Communication was pertinent in this phase, to prevent conflicts and also effective task allocation.
Lastly, we recognised the reliance on human behaviour for our application’s functionality, which was irrevocably an unpredictable factor. To mitigate this problem, our team decided to research pull factors we can incorporate for the application which could motivate people to use the application, as well as move towards the direction of streamlining and user-friendliness.
For our team, we were most proud of being able to complete this application within the short timeframe, where we could bring our idea into reality. The efforts we put in, such as working overnight till the wee hours, were certainly rewarded.
We are also proud to come out of this hackathon with new perspectives and insights, which will certainly help us in future hackathons and even professional careers. One team member had even discovered his passion for app development!
Not only have we improved our technical skill set and programming knowledge, we had also learnt another essential skill – being able to apply these skills as a tool into solutions that can make an impact. We have also gained greater appreciation into the importance of the user experience and accessibility, which often can be a deciding factor for usage and a factor that certainly cannot be neglected.
This application is a project our team feels strongly for, and seeks to continue even after this hackathon. Currently, we have several features in mind that we have put on hold in view of the time constraints. We will seek to implement these features in the near future such that we can create a comprehensive application that is able to make a real impact. An initiative to assist business practices in redirecting food that has been discarded due to cosmetic filtering to sellers at a lower cost, such that food can be prepared at lower prices to benefit the underprivileged. A more specialised emphasis on catalysing the food waste recycling process, so that we can aid the recycling organisations more effectively in collecting food waste Open up a new production stream & avenue for redirecting food waste into the compost fertiliser industry, which can further reduce food waste and give them a new life.
These features also take in the considerations of commercialisation, so as to ensure that our application and initiative is self-sustainable in the long run, and even perhaps generate jobs for our local Singaporeans, especially the underprivileged. This would be a 2-prong solution in reducing food insecurity by helping to generate financial income for these communities.
Our initiative’s focus will seek to move towards forging tight knit partnerships and collaborations among all the different communities in Singapore, as this journey cannot be done alone. The initiative can only be successful if each Singaporean is willing to do their part and come together to help Singapore conquer this problem. Education is certainly a prioritised element in our extended solution.
Kotlin, XML, Firebase Authentication, Firebase Data Storage
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ArdsG0HetXHYIJNI7cA8A5jHmOwhBEyR/view?usp=sharing
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