Zero | Devpost

🥦 About the Project — Zero: Redefining Food Management

🌍 Inspiration

Our inspiration for Zero came from realizing how much food quietly goes to waste in our own homes. According to studies, households contribute to over 6.7 million tonnes of food waste every year in the UK alone — worth about £14 billion. We wanted to transform this global challenge into a personal mission: empowering individuals to reduce waste through smart, effortless technology.

💡 What We Learned

Throughout this journey, we learned how impactful small, consistent actions can be. Building Zero deepened our understanding of:

The logistics behind food supply chains and household consumption patterns

Applying machine learning for image recognition and expiry prediction

Designing human-centered interfaces that make sustainability feel rewarding

Mathematically, we modeled food spoilage rates using exponential decay:

$$N(t) = N_0e^{(-𝜆t)}$$

where $𝑁_0$ represents the initial freshness level and 𝜆 the decay constant — helping us estimate expiration timing more accurately.

⚙️ How We Built It

We built Zero in Android Studio (Kotlin) using:

Firebase for real-time database management

Google ML Kit for barcode and image recognition