HereForSnacks

Get great food deals while fighting food waste!

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Inspiration

Restaurants and food producers often make more than what is required, leading to an excess amount of food being leftover. These leftovers often go to waste and add to the problem of food wastage in Singapore. We realized that we could hinge on this fact to ease the problem of food wastage in Singapore.

If more attention is brought to the fact that these businesses have these leftovers food that would otherwise go to waste if not purchased by the public, it could serve to spur the public into action. By providing a platform for these businesses to advertise these leftovers at a discounted price, it could entice the public to purchase these food items. In allowing these food to be consumed, it prevents it from going to waste. We belief this application would both be popular and successful, as not only can they get food at a cheaper price, they can also contribute to reducing the problem of food wastage in Singapore.

What it does

Our app allows users to source for leftover foods that are sold at discounted prices by restaurants and shops. The discount page in the app displays the various food items that are being sold at a discounted price, showing details such as the price and location. The app also has a map navigation feature that provides users with the directions to the shops that are selling the discounted food items. The app also displays the monthly savings that are saved by the user from buying various food products at discounted price, incentivising them to continue partaking in stopping food wastage.

How we built it

The mobile app was developed with Expo. The frontend was built using React Native framework as it allows cross platform development while harnessing the powerful features of React like hooks and React Navigation. It was styled with Tailwind CSS to allow easy standardisation. We used Firebase as the backend for authentication and database services. It provides convenient backend services that allow for quick prototyping.

Challenges we ran into

We spent some time setting up the coding environment. This was down to the fact that a good bit of configuration needed to be done for tailwind-rn (The styling module we used) to work. Thankfully, we managed to resolve this issue rather quickly, and were able to get on with coding the application.

In addition to this, being new to the react-native environment, we faced many errors which came across as unexplainable to us at first. But as the day went on, we learnt more and were able to resolve errors faster, and were able to prevent errors from occurring.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to put together a functional application within a short period of time, given our lack of skill and knowledge in the React Native framework. Also, we are proud of the number of features we had manged to complete as well as designing and developing a nice-looking and user-friendly UI. Apart from that, helping users with the directions to the store was actually our secondary feature as we haven't explored using geolocation libraries in react-native. However, we managed to complete that feature by using 'react-native-google-maps-directions' which we feel is a great achievement.

What we learned

We gained a lot of technical skills through the process of building almost an entire mobile application. We were rusty with React and mobile development, so it was useful to relearn the framework along with new tools and libraries that we learnt just for this project, such as the Google Maps API. We also developed a lot of software engineering skills from problem definition, ideation and design practices.

What's next for HereForSnacks

We plan to include more location features, such as allowing users to view a map of all stores providing offers, and show users good deals in their vicinity. We also hope in the long term to incorporate this app with other food donation services. Right now, our app targets residents by offering good deals before they are thrown out. It would be meaningful if the app can be utilized for food stores and charities to collaboration on bringing good food to them.

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